We have experienced a lot of encouraging things this past week. We have received some pledges of financial support. We had a great start to the classes on Corn Island, and we are planning Sunday Morning Cafe. (written by Tim Mott)
We are now into rainy season. It was delayed a little bit, but that was good because it gave Alfred the time to finish painting the house. Once they were done with the scaffolding, they used the wood to build a roof over the back porch. That is pretty much the end of construction. Now we just need to finish out a lot of little details inside the house.
Corn Island . . .
Tim had a good week of ministry in Corn Island (Kim stayed back in Bluefields. She was not feeling well and she was starting a new series with the ladies group). We expected 15 students in Corn Island, all women, and we ended up with almost 30 students, three of whom are young men. This is a good sign for developing future leaders. We worked through about 20% of the book on Bible Study Methods and we will complete it in four more trips.
Tim met up with a group that had come to Corn Island to work with the young people on the island and had a very good conversation with Billy Berrey, a former pastor who found his calling as a youth officer.
He works with troubled youth as a police officer, and in his "off time" he works with a ministry called YouthReach to get severely troubled teens the help and love they need. He brought several kids with him on this mission trip and some of them committed their lives to Christ.
Billy really has a good handle on what it takes to reach these kids who are addicted to drugs and alcohol and every social ill you can imagine (Hint: it is called love). His advice and experience will be very helpful in reaching the youth of Corn Island as well as the youth of the mainland. The group has already decided that they are going to come back to Nicaragua again as soon as they are able.
I have offered to incorporate their stories into our website because I believe it will be of great encouragement to you. Some of these kids came out of situations you cannot imagine and they have emerged serving their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Their lives have been changed in ways that are only described as miraculous.
Music Ministry . . .
We have taken Nehemiah on full time as a music teacher. It does not raise our costs since he replaced our other two music teachers. He is able to be here all day and work with the students, developing them into teams.
Nehemiah will also be coordinating music for Sunday Morning Cafe, something we are hoping to launch in a few weeks, even though our cafe area is not perfectly ready. We wanted to create an alternative to church for the 80% of people in this city who will never ever walk into the churches.
We will have a short presentation of music and a word ofencouragement and will serve donuts and coffee. We are planning to start experimenting with donut recipes this week.
We have also asked Nehemiah to work with some of the youth to create a youth Jam Session some evening where we can just bring the young people in to listen to music, a short talk and just hang out in the front yard (note how the grass has grown).
We need to have the right people in place to pull this off, but the Lord will bring it to pass.
The good thing is that these ministries are based on local individuals, so that when we come to the US, things continue as usual.
Computer Classes . . .
We will be expanding our neighborhood impact here with computer classes for a group of young people. Our desire is to use our home to reach the people of our neighborhood. We have eight young people (ages 18 and up) who want to learn to use the computer. This will give us a lot of time with them.
We have asked the Lord to help us use this place to reach out to the neighborhood and a neighbor came to the door with a list of eight young people who wanted to learn computer. How can you say no to that? It is exciting.
Ongoing Projects . . .
We are continuing the cabinet construction in the house. In this picture, you can see Kim and Alfred finishing out a bunch of drawers for the kitchen. We started today on the cabinets for the bathrooms.
Miss Leticia is working on donut recipes for the Sunday Morning Cafe ministry. The latest bunch were pretty good cake style donuts. We are still trying to come up with a light Crispy Creme style donut if anyone has a recipe.
We both went through a mild bout of high fever, headache, etc which lasted a day for each of us, but we are feeling better. This accounted for some of the delay in getting this latest update done.
We thank you as always for your prayers and your support.
Please pray for (1) more open doors to reach this neighborhood (2) our sensitivity to God's direction (3) our training classes in Corn Island.
God bless you,
Tim and Kim


|