Monday, November 16, 2009

Nov 16th

OK.
Finally going to write and let you guys know what's going on. I apologize. I've been busy and tired. Well anyways....Spain. We left pretty early on Saturday with the van full. Craig, a few teens from Marseille, us CEMistes and 2 Teens from Lille, Anna Andrejewski and Pierre-André Guillot. Albacété, Spain is where we were headed in southern Spain where they just started a new church with a preacher who went to a preaching school in Guatemala. There, we sang in plazas in the evenings and distributed papers for just reading the bible...people can come and say what they think, really kind of open, which I really take a liking to. Later in the evening, we had a conference in our hotel where we sang before there was a guest speaker or one night we had a film, which is when Greg passed out. There were other falls apart from mine which was rather dumb and embarassing. I decided to swing up on the shoulders of a few friends, but I was tired and one of them turned throwing my arm out when I had swung up a little higher than my height. Then I smacked my face on the pavement...all of this like 2 meters from a doctors office....well, kind of more like a hospital...I don't think these exist in the US..maybe a clinic...yeah, that's probably closest. I messed up my knee kind of badly but it's getting better, oh, and my face is fine :-) The last day we were there, we sang in a couple retirement homes. They were probably the most welcoming to the singing out of most people I've sang in front of. One of the guys who was at the conference gave us those opportunities. We also sang in a school that morning, promising to sing biblically. We also sang a few gospel tunes, teaching them a little about what that term means and sang father Abraham and they got to move around a little. They were very glad we were there. Little did they know we were in the same plaza as their school. We had instant response on the bible discussion nights the first day so we were pretty encouraged by that and that really kicked off our work there. The Ruiz Family are the ones who made this possible as the parents were some of the first to start the church and the 2 sons brought there family and were busy translating the whole time. I was overwhelmed as I tried to speak some Spanish as well...but i naturally translate that into my mother tongue. The trip was really overwhelming and encouraging at the same time. Esteban Ruiz really helped me out a lot when I was yelling at him in French to tell me what all these nurses were saying in the clinic. He has just lost his job and started working at the church in Geneva. He is a great guy and I know he will do great things at his church. After we came home, we had 12 hours to recover from Spain and it was off to the teen retreat at the center in the Ardèche Region. The Retreat went pretty well with more of a positive theme than past years as I'm told...but, we were really beat from Spain and I could feel the fatigue overtaking me. The retreat was really good for the teens at church as they could talk to us about their questions and try to make progress in a remote location. It's beautiful up there at this time of year, but on the other hand, starting to get cold. The two trips were great and fortunately we had some time off from classes when we got back to recuperate.

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