Feliz San Valentinos Dia!

Once again, you will have to forgive the lack of writing for two weeks, we had another week of almost no free time. Last week I had an update all ready to type up, but the only hour we had availale to visit the internet cafe turned out to be during a time when the internet was down for the day. Anyway, you can read last weeks update below.

So much has happened this past week that I am not sure how to summarize it for you, but to start, we moved to a church in Claypole on Monday. The church we are living in is a sister church of Emanuel, the home church of the hip-hop dance team we have worked with a few times before. Here we are basically working with both churches and it has been an absolute blast! Once again, the people are just so great to be around. The district of Claypole is a bit farther away from La Luz, where we had been doing all our work up until this point, so we left all the friends we were used to seeing everyday, but made new ones really quickly. The congregation of Emanuel is supposedly around 500 people so its quite a bit larger people wise than we have been used to, but this is useful for times like Kids Club because we get a lot of help! Speaking of KC, that started on Tues this time, due to the extensive outreach we had planned for the end of the week. Because of the extreme helpfulness of the church, everything ran reasonably smoothily, even when we were informed at 12am the night before that it was going to run for one more day than we had planned. I am a little worried about returning home and not knowing how to function with-what is that thing called?- oh yeah...a schedule. Surprises have become the spice of life here.

Like normal, after KC we had training time for the youth of the church. Now, usually (and quite preferably I might add) we have maybe around 25 people, at most, come for practice in the afternoon. Here, the first day we had about 30 people, the next day we had 45! Not only is that really hard to organize, but on top of this, Aaron was told he had to preach in the evening so he left to prepare. Also, there has been a bad cold going around so Axis and Fallow couldnt talk, and Hugo wasnt here. Thankfully, Dario-from Oscars church- ws there so we had one bilingual person, one spanish speaker, and three english speakers with less than stellar voices....to teach 45 people. Yeah, it was slightly stressful. But this day ended up being extremely bizarre in an amazing way. We started the afternoon teaching The Way of the Master evangelism concept which follows a series of questions that you ask people when you talk to them about the gospel. When we finished the lesson, Jen led a sample conversation with a volunteer, then we paired everyone into groups to practice amongst themselves. After about 15 minutes we were about to bring everyone back together when someone informed Jen that there had been a few non-christians in the room for some reason and what we were teaching made some much sense to them that they wanted to accept Jesus! Some of the practice conversations had been real! Talk about devine appointments! Now, we had to decide how to decide how to teach evangelism to the recently evangelized! Finally, we had everyone divided and were about to start drama practice when a few of the ladies of the church pulled us aside and told us that they felt there was a major issue of fear with the youth that was keeping some of them from participating and we needed to address it. Well, if anyone has authority on talking about conquering fears, its our school. So once again, we brought everyone together and talked to them about who they are in Christ and how He can free them from fear. Theres a drama we do called Masks (some of you may know it by King of Hearts) that represents different mask people wear to cover up a negative heart condition. This was the drama we were planning to teach and many of the youth identified with the characters in the drama and they wanted to be free of their masks. So we had an awesome time of prayer and by the time we actually started practice, it was almost time call it a day. Like I said, bizarre, but amazing! That night, we led two songs of worship and Aaron preached. In the beginning, he honestly stated that he had maybe half a page of notes for his sermon, but that he was going to be open to the Spirit and see what happened. Well, the service ended 2 1/2 hours later, complete with an amazing time of worship in Gods presence. Aaron had preached about faith and stepping out into what God wants for you. In the end, it was beautiful to see people give themselves completely to God. By 11:30, the end of the service, we cleaned up, fellowshipped and finished the day with dinner after midnight.

That was one day out of this week, believe me now when I say it was very busy? I would love to go into detail about the rest, but it would just take too much time, so here a brief overview. In the days after KC, we had a street presentation every day, sometimes twice. It was nice having an extra group of performers and Spanish speakers to help us. They would do their dances and we filled in the missing pieces. It was very hot and humid the last days of this week so we mostly did outreach around 11am or 10pm when everyone was out. Because of Valentines Day, there was fair in the area all weekend so that set things up nicely for us, lots of people were already out. I felt all the days went really well, everyone from the dance team got to share the gospel and there are getting excited about it. It is really encouraging to see them use the thins we taught them. Saturday was special because, being how it was V-day, there was a dinner show at the church. They told us they were planning for 1,000 people! While I dont think there was quite that many attending, there were a lot of people in that church. The night was nice though, different groups from the church performed dramas, dances or music and we got to do a drama too. The purpose of the dinner was to raise money for a missions trip, and to bring non-christians into the church. I believe the night was a success both ways.

One thing I have learned is that after this week I am not letting anyone know that I sing because if I hear, -Amanda, cantar! cantar Alleluia!- one more time, I may never open my mouth again. The night of the dinner, we went onstage to thank the church for everything they had done for us and they shoved a mic in my face and started chanting for me to sing. Awfully embarrassing. Right now I couldnt sing if I wanted to because my voice is sour and tired from being made to vocalize opera several nights in a row after midnight. Sheesh.

Anyway, as far as Chile goes....it looks like we may be leaving later than we had planned and no one from this church can go with us, which makes me terribly sad. Only two people from the other churches are going with us. We are praying for more because we really want to do a lot of outreach and having only our team makes this hard.

So thats about it for now. Please pray for our health, for some reason someone from my team has been sick at every church we have stayed at. So far I have been fine-nothing majoy- but please pray for the others.

As always, I miss and love all of you!!!