Hello everyone!
We hope that everyone is doing well and had a very Merry Christmas!!
It was so wonderful seeing everyone during our trip home. We initially thought that a one month trip home would be more than enough time to see friends and family and catch up with everyone that we love, but we found out quickly that it wasn't! We want to apologize to our friends, family, and those in our church family that we weren't able to see or talk to. Please know that our desire really was to spend time with each of you, but the days and weeks flew by too quickly to make it all possible.
Since we returned back to ES, life here has been SUPER crazy. Our time in the States was very refreshing and we were able to return back here with a renewed energy, and lots of new ideas for our lives and ministry. So, here is an overview of what has been going on over the past month that we have been back:
1. Beatriz - Just two short days after returning back to ES, Bea graduated from high school! Yeah!! We are so excited and proud of her!! She has decided to continue her education and go onto college. She has enrolled in the Evangelical University in San Salvador and will be starting classes on January 4th majoring in special education. She is very talented in working with small children, so I think that this is a great career choice for her.
Bea has also been busy over the past month working as an assistant teacher for the swim club where she trains. Although the position wasn't a paid position she was very excited to accept it when it was offered to her. It was a great opportunity for her to not only improve her swim skills, but also to learn increased self-discipline and responsibility. She was responsible for teaching swim to the littlest kids in the mornings and then in the afternoon she trained. She left in the mornings at 6:30am and returned home very tired at 4:30 in the afternoon.
2. Church - Over the past month we have had some ups and downs in the church. Some really positive things that have happened include our baptism celebration that we held in November. Bobby and Daniel (the assistant pastor) had the priviledge of baptizing 5 of our youth! Praise God! Following our home church's example, we made the event a celebration. We rented a small park and held our normal service there around the pool, followed by the baptisms, lunch, and then spending the afternoon hanging out and swimming in the pool. It was a great and blessed day!
Another blessing in the church is that attendance for our Wednesday services has been up, way up!! We began having the Wednesday services and attendance has slowly been on the rise. We had only 12 at our first Wednesday service, and last week we had over 50 (of course, last wednesday was our Christmas service, so this attributes to the increase as well) and the week before we had almost 40! Yeah!!! On the down side, attendance at our Saturday service has dropped dramatically. What was once routinely 40 or more has dropped by half. In addition, some of our leaders on our leadership team are waivering right now as they walk through some personal struggles in their own lives. But, the awesome God that we serve always has everything in control and we are going to be blessed with a short term mission team that is coming down Jan 2 - 9th to help us! The awesome thing about this team is that they were originally planning on coming down and distributing back packs filled with school supplies, but due to some problems with customs, they had to cancel that project and were scrambling at the last minute to figure out what to do. At the same time we began praying that God would show us how to reach out to the many youth who have fallen away and give them a renewed fire and passion. So, to make a long story short, God connected this team with us and now a week long project has been planned that includes a church "spruce up," evangelism and personal visits, a really cool game day, and a special "kick off the year" service! I am so excited to see how He is going to work in all of this!
In addition, thanks to the financial blessing of a wonderful friend, we were able to have an awesome Christmas service last Wednesday! It was a great service with more than 50 people in attendance! We decorated the church with lots of red and green and Christmas lights, Bobby gave a great message (he talked about how God gave us the awesome gift of His son so what gift will we give Him this year?), and we topped it all off by serving pizza and giving away tons of gifts! It was an awesome service!!
3. Samuel and Jonathon - As many of you know, two boys (Samuel and Jonathon) will be coming to join our home this month. We have been very busy working with them and planning for their arrival over the past few weeks. They picked the day that they would be coming to live with us, and they picked the 28th (so lots of prayers on Monday please!!). Samuel has decided to continue studying at the Evangelical University. He took some classes there last year, but didn't do so well, so we are praying that he is able to turn things around this year. We enrolled Jonathon in a Christian school and he will be beginning the 7th grade in January.
In addition to preparing physically for their arrival (painting their room, furniture, school) we have been trying to prepare them, ourselves, and Bea emotionally for this big change. We have spent a lot of time talking to everyone individually and together, and of course, lots of prayer. We understand that this is going to be a big change for everyone so we welcome your prayers as God leads us into this next chapter of our lives.
Well, that about wraps up the major highlights of what has been going on in our part of the world. We now have the blessing of having internet in our home, so hopefully keeping up will be a bit easier now. We have posted many new pictures to our phanfare website www.bobandbrit.phanfare.com as well as to our facebook page, so please feel free to check them out! We haven't updated our blog in a while, but plan to do so soon, so stay tuned.
Lastly, we want to say a big giant thank you to all of you who pray for us, support us, encourage us, and love us! We are truly grateful!!
Feliz Navidad a todos y Dios les bendiga!
In Christ,
Britney and Bobby
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