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Today, February 21, 2010 we started Sunday School at Faith Baptist Church in Sorocaba (can you hear the sounds of trumpets in the background?)! We had 37 present with a few that we didn't expect. Dawn taught the ladies, that's right ladies! Up to today we have had "lady" as in singular. Dawn taught, Marcia, our regular, Amanda, Marcia's daughter and Rosie. Rosie is the one that was a surprise. She has a teen son, Guilherme, who came to Christ several months ago but she has showed little interest in church. We have been having a Bible study with her for the last 10 weeks and on a number of occasions we have presented the Gospel which has forced her to evaluate her relationship with God. Just yesterday Dawn said, "Are we going to continue our study with Rosie?" No. Was my answer. Then she comes today! Praise the Lord! Pray for her salvation. I taught the Juniors (its my lot in life) and had a blessing of a time doing so! Actually it was the biggest class o

We had a blast on our teen retreat! There is just no other way of putting it, we had a blast! The Lord blessed us with great weather, good fellowship, good food, good challenges from the book of James and plain old fun! Our team decided to do something a bit different this year. Usually we encourage our teens to participate in the annual Carnival retreat put on by our local churches. This year we did our own retreat. We separated from the world but were not separate from the world. Did that make sense? Jesus called His disciples from the world unto Himself yet He and they walked in and among multitudes daily. We called our teens apart from their "normal" worlds and to an "abnormal" world that they ended up loving. We were family for four precious days; four days that had an impact on us all. Let me see if I can piece the retreat together for you. There were eleven of us, four teens and seven adults. That is a great teen-adult ratio if you really want to get into you

Last Friday Alexandre and I went to talk to an accountant friend. He will be working on some important paper work that needs to be submitted to the mayor's office for our church to be a recognized entity. Paperwork here can be a lengthy ordeal and we would love to have you praying with us about this important process. I've already mentioned that Alexandre was able to raise some money to help in our land purchase. One of our supporting churches has also taken on the challenge and will be giving their January and February Adult Sunday school offering to the purchase. As we talked to our accountant friend he informed us that we might be able to get a piece of land donated to the church! So, if you would also remember this as you go to the Throne of Grace for us we would be thankful. Can you imagine what a blessing that would be! We have prayed that God would make His will perfectly plain to us. If we are given the property to the next church I believe that that would be His hand a

Game time was fun with one big game and several smaller games throughout each day. The first day was a team obstacle course, the second day's big game was giant squirt gun wars. I found a cool plan for a PVC quirt cannon and made ten of them to be used to waste each other with water! The third day was team mud wrestling! Worse than it sounds but a lot of fun to watch! The games were meant to be fun but they also taught team work. With missions being the theme the kids had to learned to work together. The adult leaders seemed to like the all of the games exceptthe Mud pit! It was definitely the most interesting to watch. God arranged for it to rain all night the night before our last day. So there was a large area where some fresh dirt had just been put down. We came up with this wild idea of having a team mud challenge. Of course all of the time I was expecting to be thrown down to my muddy death. But, praise the Lord it never happened! As you can see the kid's loved it!

Planning always makes camp run smoother. It was planning and a great camper/worker ratio that made this year's effort a special blessing. Our speaker was evangelist Barry Webb. He is a chalk artist, puppeteer and practical preacher of God's Word. Everyone was awed by his chalk drawing and we saw three of our twenty kids make decisions for Christ as a result of brother Webb's preaching. And one more came to Christ on Sunday! Our camp theme was Missions so Alexandre divided the kids into two teams, Japan and Switzerland, for a rousing competition. Dawn made flags for the two delegations and her cooking kept us all going. We had some fun Mike Jewell type games to add to the drama and Alexandre's enthusiasm and organization dovetailed every effort. To literally top it all off a local ice cream company donated over thirteen gallons of their luscious product for our camper's consumption. It was our friend Alcir, the world famous sandwich man, who made that part of our men

 I didn't get to send anything out last week because it was really busy. So, I am going to give it to you in "small" chunks this week so that you don't miss all of the fun that we had. But I have to back up a few months to show you how God blessed the three days of Kid's Camp. In July a cottage had been reserved for the Camp. We had made a sizeable deposit to reserve it and were excited about the " discount " that the caretaker had given us. As it turned out, it was a " five-finger discount ." The caretaker was a crook. She took our money and dissapeared and we didn't find out about the scam until just a week before we were to use the cottage! However, God blessed in a really neat way and we saw Him open an impossible door so that we were able to use the cottage after all. But because of the confusion we had to change the dates of the retreat. Imagine doing that at your church! OK kids, sorry but summer camp has been moved up a week! OH MY!