Catching up

It seems like we're often writing blogs to catch up. We really thought that the fall would be a bit slower and that we'd have more time for things like writing blogs. The fall has simply just been different than what the spring and summer were.

We wrote just before Thanksgiving. We enjoyed Thanksgiving here with other American missionaries. We, like most of you all enjoyed turkey, ham, dressing, broccoli rice casserole, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, homemade rolls and the list goes on and on. It was a fun day of great fellowship. The day after was fun too. In the states their were parking lot wars of "black Friday". Here it was just a normal Friday. We (us 3 missionary families at NLCH) enjoyed a day out together. We grabbed lunch at a mall food court and then played a couple of games of bowling before returning to have leftovers from our Thanksgiving feast.

On December 7 Lee left with Chad Smith (another missionary here at the home) and 7 of our older kids for a 4 day mission trip to western Guatemala and a brief crossing into Mexico. Over the 4 days they stopped at between 20 and 25 churches to share with the kids of the community and give out Christmas gifts. Another ministry called Hearts for Heaven planned the trip, as well as, collected the Christmas gifts - Lee, Chad and the kids were the hands and feet of the effort and gave out the gifts and shared a gospel message through stories with the kids.

This past Tuesday we took our middle aged girls out for their "school vacation excursion". We're really enjoying taking the kids out in small groups for a fun afternoon - not only is it something fun and out of the ordinary to do, I think they just like getting out of the home and seeing other things. This week, we took 5 girls out and went bowling. None of them had played before - and all of them complained of their arms hurting at the end of our time together :). The only bad part of the whole thing was the traffic jam of all traffic jams that we experienced on the way home. It took us over 2 hours to go just 13 miles - yuck!

Also this past week we finished our two teenage small groups for the year. We'll start those back up mid January-ish. We plan on continuing to have our group of college aged kids during the holidays. Our groups are going well, our relationship with those involved in the groups is growing, and our spanish is continually challenged.

Christmas preparations are now in full swing. It is fun to get to be a part of Christmas on this kind of scale. 50 kids, plus employees and their families = a mountain of cookies to be baked, lots of presents to be wrapped, and more excitement than you can imagine housed in a bunch of little kids.

Here are a few pics of recent events:

The second stop of the trip was a church plant in progress out in the country. A few of our kids climbed coconut trees nearby and knocked a few down to be eaten.


One of the visited churches.


Most of the visited churches were small, poor churches.


Handing out gifts.


Group shot from the trip. If you look closely, you can see the pacific ocean in the background.


*I've been trying to add other pictures, but blogspot is being weird - I'll try again later.