Celebrating Life!

We have been having so much fun this month! We were invited to a birthday party for our friend Albano’s children. He has 3 kids and since they don’t have a lot of money, they threw one big birthday party. It was such a special time and so different from any other party we have gone to. This party was really a time of worshipping God. Albano spoke to everyone that came and just gave thanks to God that He blessed him and his wife with 3 wonderful children. Albano also thanked God for sustaining their lives, as they have been very sick with malaria several times. He dedicated these children to God and told everyone that these children were God’s children and that he was blessed to be their father to raise them. It was so sweet! What a neat thing to do at a birthday party! We were pretty touched by the way he chose to celebrate the lives of his children. Next, they broke out into some songs and started dancing for the Lord! It wouldn’t be an African party without endless songs and dancing! It was a great time.

A great highlight of the last couple of weeks was attending a Baptist meeting with all the pastors from the Nampula province. Ok…we are being sarcastic…it was everything but a highlight! The meeting started at 8 am, so we knew that we shouldn’t arrive until 9 since we are living on Africa time (they are always late here!). We were scheduled to talk about our ministry at 10 am. Well 10am comes and goes then 11, 12, 1, then about 2:30 they thought it would be ok to break for some lunch. Hallelujah! We ate some beans and shima and then returned to the meeting at 3. We were impressed because the typical lunch is about a 2 hour break. So as we sat there for a couple more hours, we came to the conclusion that our heads were going to explode with the amount of Portuguese absorbed and that we needed to go. We made a great decision…the meeting lasted until 11pm! We ended up not speaking and we don’t know if they ever got back on their schedule of speakers, but we are glad we didn’t wait around to find out! In America, we will never complain about another Baptist business meeting again, because this had to be the worse ever! A 6 hour meeting turned into 15 hours!

Without sarcasm now, the real highlight of our week was having some of the girls over from the orphanage. We wanted to celebrate their lives and make them feel special…so we threw them a party!! We had so much fun with them. We ate cupcakes, played pin the face on the African girl (knock off of the game “pin the tail on the donkey”) colored pictures, painted our nails, and opened presents. They loved it. We all wore the same capalana (African skirt) and a pink shirt. It was really fun to see their reactions to everything! Some of the girls didn’t know how to open a present and some of them had never had their nails painted. Their smiles and laughter blessed us so much! When we picked them up at the orphanage, they had put on their best clothes and were all nice and clean and ready to go! As soon as we got in the car, one of the girls (Virginia) reminded us that we needed to pray for safety as we travel to the house! After we prayed, the little girls just broke into song, praising God until we got to our house, which is a 20 minute drive. We loved it! It brought to our minds Matthew 21:16, where Jesus quotes the psalm, “From the lips of children and infants, you have ordained praise.” Just listening to these sweet little voices singing songs to the Lord was something we will never forget! Once the party was over we drove them back to the orphanage. The rest of the kids ran and greeted the girls and told them that they were so beautiful. We just heard compliment after compliment and the girls were soaking it all up! We loved seeing them feeling special…that is what we wanted to accomplish from the party! It was a perfect day!


As for our TLW team…we have been surprised each week as more and more youth show up! The last 2 weeks we have had 11-12 people come! It is so exciting! God is doing some great things during our times with them. They are learning more about the Bible and Corey’s doing an amazing job teaching them. God has just taken his tongue and made it speak Portuguese so well. It is becoming more natural to him and we know God has given him the grace to become more comfortable in the language! We are having a lot of fun with our new team. It feels like they are our little Sunday School class and we get to teach them in fun, creative ways. Thanks so much for praying for us through this time of development!

As for this week, please: 1) Praise God…we have had a great turn out in our last 2 TLW meetings! Pray that God will work in their hearts to be committed to Him and TLW and that they will desire to have closer walk with the Lord. 2) Pray that God will continue to help us cross our language barrier to minister effectively to our team and other nationals as well. 3) Pray that God would help us to see the areas of our lives where we are just merely people pleasing…pray that we can change and strive to please only God. 4) Pray that we would have daily guidance on who to give to and how much to give. Pray for patience in this area. 5) Pray that God would help us work out all of the preparation details for our HBC team that is coming. 6) We are traveling to Malawi next week for an annual missionary training meeting. Please pray for traveling mercies as the roads will be quite rough!