This coming week, the music classes start and within a couple more weeks, the Bible training classes will begin. There are so many possibilities here, but we are getting it started slowly and carefully. (written by Tim Mott)
 This week we had several meetings in advance of the music training. We have about 15 young people who want to learn keyboard or guitar. We have enlisted two music teachers who will be teaching group lessons so that it keeps the cost down as opposed to teaching individual lessons. We appreciate your financial support that makes it possible to hire these teachers.
Each class will meet two times per week and then the students will be able to come to our place and practice upstairs several hours each week. Our teachers will be teaching chord theory so that the students will learn to play by ear because very often, they do not have sheet music. Many of the choruses are not even written down anywhere.
 On Friday, Tim had to fly to Managua to pick up the books for the leadership training program, and then turn around and fly right back. It was a waste of time and money, but there was no other option.
The books were sent from the printer in India via UPS, addressed to us in Bluefields. We found out that they would not release the books from customs in Managua without me going there personally. Next time, we will know better and have them addressed to someone in Managua who can pick them up and send them by bus to us in Bluefields.
We are receiving DVD's weekly from LakePointe church in Rockwall, and from Cornerstone Church in CA and we are using these to supplement our teaching. Both of these churches have been very helpful in sending these to us. We don't even know the people at Cornerstone, but since we are missionaries, they offered to send them to us for free. How cool is that.
On Tuesday, I mentioned that I would like to start showing worship and message DVD's on Friday evenings. I was not exactly thinking of this Friday evening, but on Friday at about 6:30 several guys showed up. Israel (in the red shirt on the left) had invited these guys to join us in the leadershi p training and they came back Friday evening.
(From left to right, Israel, Ray, Tim, Leonard, James)
They are from Monkey Point (an hour south of Bluefields by speedboat). There are probably about 150 people in this community without a church.
These guys asked us if we could come down there and hold outdoor services from time to time. They said that they would get the people together if we would just come.
The truth is that there are dozens of little communities like this on the Atlantic Coast, which makes us ponder the question:
"What would it take to reach people in every one of these communities?"
In each one of these communities, there are people who love Jesus and are hungry for the Word. We must find a way to take it to them, because they cannot come to us. We are going to continue that conversation this week.
This week in our discipleship group we were in Acts 19, which is about Paul's time in Ephesus. Ephesus was a regional center, and in three years, Paul had saturated the entire area with the message of Jesus the Messiah. He had "regional impact" so that churches were started all over the area. That is the kind of impact we are called to have in our area too.
 We had a good meeting with the leadership team from Hopewell Baptist Church. We are working through the book of Acts with them and supplementing it with some teaching from the church DVD's that we receive. We have a good consistent group here on Tuesday afternoons.
We are still working on a few projects on the house. Tim is working on cabinets slowly and will probably be working on that all year. There is not a lot of time left from cabinet work (cause we did not come here to build cabinets). We had the guys pour a new top on the concrete under the veranda. The original crew did not slope it right, even though we discussed it with them several times. That is OK, it is fixed now and it looks good.
We are still waiting for our stuff to be shipped from Miami to El Bluff. The last two weeks, they have not sent a ship to El Bluff, so we are hoping they will do it this week. We need to get our study Bibles so we can get the training classes started.
We are planning to go to NY to see our parents in May for about 12 days. We will not be coming to TX on this trip. We just have so many things we need to do here that we have to really limit our time away from Bluefields. We will make another trip to TX sometime this year, just not sure when.
Well, that is all the news that is fit to print.
Thank you as always for your prayers.
God bless you,
Tim and Kim |
