Auburn Thursday Night Parties

The English parties have been so much fun this year. Our first party was a 4th of July party, our second a western party, our third was the Auburn party and our fourth was the Christmas party. The Luau next Thursday night is our fifth and final cultural get together to connect our English students with our church members. The missionaries will continue to study the Bible with those English students who have been spiritually interested in the studies.

Auburn Group Arrives – Matt and all the girls!

The same day that the Highland campaign group left, the Auburn LST group arrived. There are 3 girls (Lindsey, Danielle, and Tiffany) and 2 boys (Lucas and Lee) in the group who came to teach English using the Bible – the book of Luke. The girls are staying with us and their first night they got here we blew the main breaker in the house! Poor Matt with 6 girls in the house: 3 LST girls, Heather, me Aubry, and even the dog is a female. He was sure glad to see Kathryn and Parks arrive to have another guy in the house.

First Service in the New Building!!!

We had our first service together in our new building. Antenor Goncalves was our guest speaker that day and our building looked completely transformed – talk about an extreme make-over! Praise God for small miracles and brothers and sisters in Christ!

Youth Retreat - Conquerors or Wanderers?

We had a full house at youth retreat this year (literally). We took the campaign group with us to a town about an hour away and all stayed together in a big house with 12 bedrooms. We had 23 total Brazilian kids almost all of whom we’ve been studying the Bible with on Friday nights for a while now. The theme was Kadesh and whether these kids will be conquerors or wanderers. One of the Highland youth went home and was baptized afterwards and one of our Brazilian kids came back from the retreat wanting to study more one on one about baptism. A special thank you to the Brimingham and Maynard families for making this youth retreat possible. Their contribution secured us the place for the retreat.

VBS

The campaign group put on two afternoon VBS’s. One was in the neighborhood where we have one of our biggest weekly church small groups. And the other was in the neighborhood near the new church building at the apartment complex of the Sasses. Both were major successes and the campaigners even went back later to play soccer with some of those kids.

Highland Campaign

We don’t know how we would have moved out of our old buiding and into our new building without the campaign group from Highland coming to help us. They came in the middle of June and did everything from cleaning and painting and packing and unpacking to VBS and youth retreat. It was also good to have Phyllis and Antenor with us (a missionary couple from the South of Brazil) who taught a couples class and did a lot of translation work and errands. We worked the entire campaign group very hard and were blessed by their presence, encouragement, and hard labor.

Aubry Talking and Walking

Fun with Hippo

Aubry began to crawl really well at 9 months after we got back from the States. Since then she's gotten stronger and more interactive.

Aubry Crawling

Heather’s Arrived! – Two Year Intern and Roommate

Heather is our new apprentice and just moved in with us this week. She will be living with us for 2 years. She and Aubry are already great roommates and friends. Her main ministry will be with the children of our church. She has just graduated from Abilene Christian University in Elementary Education and was our children’s ministry intern for the summer last year. Her Portuguese is already almost as good as ours. We’re excited about her life and work here and hope she decides to stay longer. Stay tuned to find out about the campaign from her church that arrived today and the youth retreat we are all preparing for next weekend!

Meet Mariana – Blind Bible Student

Mariana is a blind 22 year old girl that Mary Virginia is studying the Bible with right now. She was baptized at 17 and loves the Lord but has had no church family for a while now. Handicap people here are much less independent than those in our culture. There is a Christian family who comes to our church that has a car and has committed to bringing her on Sundays now. I haven’t learned all of her faith story yet but I love studying God’s word with her because she is so hungry for it and depends on those who will read it to her. I wish my hunger and thirst for God and His Word were as great as hers. She has no Braille Bible (even though she can read Braille) because Portuguese Bibles are so expensive. If you would like to make a special contribution toward Mariana’s Braille Bible I may be able to buy a little at a time or if you know of a better way to buy something like this please, let us know.

Saturday Work Days at the Building

Tomorrow will be our 4th Saturday in a row to work at our new building. As many of you already know we have a new building now! This building used to be a strip club so it needs a lot of work to turn it from being a tool of Satan to now being a tool of God. What a great symbol of redemption for our community when we finally finish! The building is one neighborhood over from where we were, still in front of the beach (even more so), much more visible, and right in front of a residential area (unlike the commercial area we were in). It is also a more usable space. This new building offers much more ventilation and therefore cooler usable class rooms. The sign is up now and many things were moved from the old building to the new one these past two Saturdays. We’ve had between 20 and 40 workers or so from church each Saturday. {And on a side note: remember Lorena the lawyer, the second convert we had almost two years ago? She has been a huge help in securing our new place and easing out of the old one. Not sure how we would have done this without her. Thank you for those of you who prayed for her spiritual journey as a new Christian.} There is still much work to be done and we’re not sure we’ll be ready but the most important thing is to pray that our members are spiritually ready for this big move. Many new Christians much come a little further in order to get there, some even have to take two buses now instead of one which will be a sacrifice for them financially. Thanks for your support of this work! Be excited about what all God is doing in this work.

Monkeys in the House!

Lately, we've been having more monkeys come in the breakfast room looking for fruit. We had a team day last week and Russ' Mom Debbie and Jennifer fed them bananas from our deck so this week they've been looking for more. When you catch them they screach real loud with surprise and then run out the window. Watch out for Nalah monkeys!

Vacation, Mother's Day, Crawling

Well, our vacation went very well. This was the first time we’ve taken our vacation stateside. Thanks to Larry and Claire Owens and MommaLou and DaddyBob, we got to bring Aubry to Alabama so she could spend mother’s day weekend with all of her grandparents and great grandparents while Matt and I, thanks to Dad, went west and spent a week in Lake Tahoe and Yosimite Park. We didn’t expect it to be so cold in May but it was beautiful nonetheless and we enjoyed the many hikes. Meanwhile, Aubry went to the Grand Ole Opry! It was our first time apart for so long - thank goodness for cell phones. She grew more hair while we were away and started crawling and pulling up when we got back!