This has been a crazy year: Martha'cancer, two burglaries to our house, numerous car repairs totaling more than $2000, plus all the "normal" stressors that we'd expect to have. Well, two-and-a-half weeks have now passed without any new emergencies!
That makes this a good time to update you on a few things:
Martha's Cancer: Martha got her exterior layer of stitches out this past week. There's another layer of stitches underneath that still has to come out. How do you get stitches out that are beneath the skin after all the wounds have healed? That's a question for greater minds than mine! It's my understanding that these are not the kind that dissolve. She'll have to go in for checkups every two months for the next year or so. See the previous blog entry for the rest of the details.
Tejarcillos: The children's ministry is going great. Fran and Ileana's house is bursting at the seams on Friday nights and we are prayerfully considering whether to build or move. We're doing an outreach at a nearby drug rehab center a week from Sunday. We've been wrestling with the idea of restarting the church or continue on as a para-church ministry. Tejarcillos has lots of churches today, but they tend to be highly pastor-centered and authoritarian and either extremely fundamentalist or pentecostal. The idea of starting a new church would be to establish something balanced in which people how to think for themselves and interet the Bible, rather than a pastor telling them what to think. Fran and Ileana are not in a place to help make these kinds of decisions right now. Some people take in stray animals. Fran and Ileana tend to take in stray family members. They've taken in Fran's biological mother (she did not raise him) recently and it's put a lot of stress on the family. That was after taking in daughter Natalia's little girl Alexa, who is two. Their adopted daughter Fiorela is also Ileana's biological granddaughter. Now they have three girls and Fran's mother in one bedroom in a small house. So we've been raising funds to build another room onto the house. Once things feel normal for them, we'll make some decisions about how to move forward in ministry.
Teaching Seminary? A week from Saturday, I'll be teaching part of a course at a local seminary. I have room on my "plate" for more ministry and the seminary needs help with its "certificate program." This is a program of fourteen courses designed for folks who have discerned a call from God to pastoral ministry but lack a high school diploma. The seminary will be trying me out, so it's sort of an audition. The course is congregational development, and I'll be teaching a one-hour segment on the pastoral care of young children. So please pray that it goes well!
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