3 is the Magic Number! A Growing Family, Semana Santa, Chairs for Children

#1 So, in the last blog post, I wrote about my friend Vanessa who through the course of visiting her and studying the Word in Discipleship came to accept Christ as her Savior. I also shared that we were fasting and praying for her husband to come to the Lord. Two weeks later, he also gave his life to Christ! Praise the Lord! This couple still has many struggles that they will be facing and working through, but now they both have Christ remolding them from the inside.

#2 I have also had the privilege within the last three weeks to pray with two others to accept Christ into their lives, one of which took place this past week called Semana Santa. (Holy Week)  Unlike the church in the United States, Semana Santa is celebrated more among the Catholics and non-believers than the evangelical church. As with Christmas the church here believes that we don't know the exact dates of when Christ's death and resurrection took place, so they choose  not to participate in celebrations that have become largely pagan. The Church in Quebracho spent these seven days unified in a church-wide fast as well as putting on a 3-day Campaña (outreach service that is held outside in the community). The prayer team went out into the community to invite them to attend and we readied some tasty foods to sell in order to continue raising funds for the Church building. The events were a success with 6 people either reconciling their lives to Christ or accepting him as their personal Savior and at least 1/2 the barrio of Quebracho was in attendance to here the Word of God preached. Now... for the follow-up

#3 Over the past two weeks the kids from Children's church sold raffle tickets for a set of cups, plates, and forks in order to raise funds to buy chairs for our children's program. We have always shared chairs with the adult church, but as our family continues to grow, we are just out of chairs for everyone. We are at the point that we will need more chairs just for the adults, plus this will be the first activity where the kids have put in their own effort to improve our conditions. We raised $560 cordobas (about $20 U.S.) and will hopefully be able to buy about 12 children's chairs... hopefully... if I can talk them down, and into giving me a good price! hahaha...

Here is a picture of some of the kids enjoying their new chairs. (At the end of the day, I only managed to talk them into 9 chairs for the money that we had raised)