Saturday Post -- 02/11/13

FT staff and assorted family members, last Saturday.

Another Saturday, another early exit from the house, this time a breakfast date with a friend, before the usual slew of church commitments this afternoon and evening. I commented to Amanda the other day that I don’t feel we’re taking things one day at a time so much as one weekend at a time, so busy are we now on Saturdays and Sundays. In any case, I will do my best to recount some of the major points of the past week in the short time available.

I posted last week’s update as we were leaving for Fundación Totaí’s anniversary celebration out at the lake. As it happens, the steak was not quite up to the standards we usually expect around here. Nevertheless, we enjoyed a relaxing day as a staff, playing games, paddling in the lake, and reflecting on the Lord’s goodness to us. Amanda spoke for fifteen minutes about what God has done in her own life through FT, as well as the tremendous growth she’d witnessed in the institution and the staff during the time we’ve been here.

The rest of Saturday and Sunday were taken up with our usual church commitments, including a church leaders’ meeting for me on Sunday afternoon. But a two-day ‘weekend’ lay in store, which served as a motivator; in addition to our usual Monday day off, with the anniversary falling on the Tuesday we enjoyed a whole 48 hours outside the FT building (which is also where our church meets, so it’s somewhat difficult to avoid): pancakes, reading marathons and extended Wii sessions ensued.

However, we did set aside a little of our time on the Tuesday to meet with our fellow youth leaders to discuss camp, now just two weeks away. There were a whole range of key points we still hadn’t finalised (the timetable, the transportation, the makeup of the teams) so it was worth sacrificing a couple of hours of everyone’s day off to emerge with a better idea of what we want to do. The week before camp, we will meet with those from the church who have volunteered to provide assistance. If nothing else, the whole endeavour should do wonders for church unity.

Another desired, if not essential, component to a good camp is good weather, and these are interesting times in that regard. Usually the winter winds die down by late August and September till November see temperatures and humidity soaring (40 Celsius is an achievable target) only for rainy season to come and ease the tension somewhat from late November onwards. Well, this year winter stretched out well into September, there were perhaps two weeks of heat and humidity in early October and since then, we’ve had nothing but heavy rain every day! As yet another storm broke during the night, I felt a strong urge to pray for this particular aspect of camp. We could really do with a couple of hot weeks to dry out the campsite in preparation for the invasion of El Jireh church.

Five paragraphs? I’ve had shorter posts on non-breakfast-date Saturdays. Here are our main prayer points.

Prayer

• For our latest overseas volunteer, Aline Sacher (Germany), who is currently enduring something of a travel nightmare – although unusually, Bolivia is this time in no way at fault! It seems her first flight (within or from the UK) was delayed, knocking everything back a few hours. She had been due to get the midday flight from Santa Cruz to Trinidad, but that won’t be happening seeing as she arrives in Santa Cruz at lunchtime. Worse still, no seats on internal flights are available until Sunday, so she has an overnight in Santa Cruz before arriving here at 11am tomorrow – or that’s the plan, at least! Pray for a safe arrival for Aline and for a good first week of settling in.
• Pray for the continued camp preparations.
• For another hectic weekend, particularly Sunday, in which Craig is preaching and Amanda has her Bible study group. Somewhere amongst all this, we also need to pick Aline up from the airport.
• …and then we some work to do on Monday! Amanda will (God-willing) be giving Aline her induction, while I have been asked to give a sermon on missions at the local offices of Samaritan’s Purse, who have a fellowship morning on the first Monday of the month. I took a missions angle in a sermon I gave on John 21 in the church last year, so it’ll just be a case of tweaking for my audience.
• These prayer points are getting almost as long as the post itself! We’re going through a somewhat nerve-shredding experience at FT right now. About a month ago, we registered Amanda’s audiology colleague Odalys for a training course in Guatemala next weekend, buying flights in the process. There were, however, two not insignificant obstacles. Odalys didn’t have a passport, and Bolivians require a visa to enter Guatemala. The passport came through early last week and on Thursday the 24^th, the visa application was sent to the nearest Guatemalan embassy in Lima, with the aid of a world-renowned courier company, to ensure that no time would be wasted
  
  
  . Well, let’s just say that the ability to track packages online is a mixed blessing. This has been the route of the application since leaving Bolivia for Peru (a neighbouring country, for the uninitiated):

o   Miami, USA

o   Montevideo, Uruguay

o   Buenos Aires, Argentina

We are, to say the least, lacking in confidence that the visa will be processed and sent back to Trinidad by next Friday, when Odalys is due to leave. Moreover, the embassy staff in Lima have thus far answered not a single phone call or email. Prayer is required for a mighty work of the Lord in this situation.

Praise

• Amanda is thankful that she managed to get through a pile of marking this week. She was correcting the ‘Kids Games’ exams, with this year’s session having wrapped up last week.
• For a good time together as a staff out at the lake last weekend. 

¡Que Dios les bendiga!

Craig & Amanda