Saturday Post -- 13/07/13

I write with a mild headache following a glass or two of wine late last night in celebration of our anniversary. We enjoyed a lovely evening at our favourite fish restaurant, taking the time to reminisce on these past six years and reflect on God’s overwhelming care for us as a couple.

Of course, if you’re one of those sorts of people who has everyone’s birthday and anniversary stored away in a mental Filofax (in which case you’d be more than welcome here – Bolivians’ obsession with birthdays is all-consuming), then you’ll have worked out that we were five days late in marking the occasion. Not a case, I stress, of either of us forgetting the big day; simply that the day itself fell slap-bang in the middle of a pretty brutal weekend.

Friday: youth leaders’ meeting. We had invited our cohorts to the house for an evening of planning for the next couple of months, while enjoying some social time when that was out of the way. In the end, time prohibited us from letting our hair down (as only youth leaders can!). That said, we managed to make some headway on our programme for the year, while also making our initial forays into planning for what, we hope, will be our first ever youth group camp.

Saturday: The Usual. 9am-Noon: Grocery shopping (Amanda)/blogging & sermon preparation (Craig); 2-4:30pm: Discipleship session with Grecia (Amanda)/piano lesson and band practice (Craig); 4:30-6pm: Bible Explorers’ Club (Amanda); 6.15-9:30pm: pre-youth group leaders’ meeting, youth group, driving youth to their various homes around town (both); 10pm: Crash.

Sunday: The actual date of our anniversary, was pretty much same-old Sunday, with two exciting additions: watching the last set of Murray-Djokovic, and a church leaders’ meeting in the afternoon! Oh, and an anniversary celebration, albeit not our own. For we share the same date (though a year later) with our old friends Jerry & Georgina. Excitingly, Georgina’s family, for the first time ever, had opted to pay a visit to Trinidad from their home way down south in Tarija, a lovely little city near the Argentinian border. A knees-up was in order. So we were delighted to join with their family and many friends to celebrate their seven years. Doubly exciting for me (and this picks up on the theme from the post a couple of weeks back) was the fact that several members of the church band had gotten together, independently of me and without prompting, to produce a programme of music for the evening, much of which was centred around the One at the centre of Jerry & Georgina’s partnership.

Monday: Party planning. Our weekly time-to-ourselves day was taken up with preparing for a great celebration, that of Maicol & KC’s boy Caleb’s adoption. They had requested the use of our home for a small party with family and friends in the early evening and, of course, we were more than happy to oblige. Pippa Middleton was nowhere to be seen but I reckon we made a decent fist of it under the circumstances. It would be back to our work at FT on Tuesday, but we hardly even required that incentive to make it an especially early bedtime, that evening, our final exchange before sleep took hold being a look that conveyed a thousand (or, to be more precise, five) words: Where did that one go?

I tend to prize my personal space a little more than the average person but you know what? Sometimes it’s OK to be busy, especially when there is so much to be encouraged by and thankful for in the process. We were particularly thrilled to be able to support Maicol & KC in that way as well.

This weekend, then, represents more of an opportunity to re-charge the old batteries. I’ll let you know how that’s going once Saturday’s out of the way.

Prayer

• A fair bit of travelling going on this week. First up, the Holts are currently in Santa Cruz, having left Trinidad on Thursday. God-willing, they will catch their flight from there to Sao Paulo tomorrow morning. And then on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, they fly to Edinburgh via Heathrow. Pray for protection, both for the family and for their belongings!
• Secondly, our guest this past month, medical volunteer Joe Sturman, is due to take a somewhat less staggered route to Birmingham, leaving on Wednesday afternoon for Santa Cruz before catching a midnight flight to Miami, and then on to London on Thursday. Prayers appreciated for Joe.
• I’m due to visit a church tomorrow to give another Emmaus presentation (indeed, the same church I’d been planning to visit a couple of weeks back – before I was rained off). Pray that more people might take advantage of the course to enhance their personal Bible study and growth.
• Pray for Amanda’s young women’s Bible study group, who meet tomorrow evening for the first time in three weeks. 

Praise

• For the encouragement in the midst of our various activities last weekend.
• For six years during which the Lord has been so good to us as a couple, often, as Amanda pointed out last night, fighting for us while we have (usually with great difficulty!) kept silent (Exodus 14:14). We have so much to be thankful for. 

¡Que Dios les bendiga!

Craig & Amanda