We started the week of our gospel meeting with full force.  We don’t actually start the meeting until tonight, but in our pre-meeting evangelism we have had 15 baptisms!!  We have the students of the Bible Institute of Central America (where three of our memebers attend) helping us evangelize, and they are doing a great job!  They have plans to help a different congregation host a gospel meeting the last week of each month.  So, we are at 20 baptisms for the year!!  What a great way to start a new year I say!!  Please keep these new members in your prayers, and hopefully some time this week I’ll get a long enough break to upload pictures…

Thursday we are starting a small ladies group that will be reading “The 5 Love Languages”.  I’m really excited about this, because it will be our first indepth study where everyone has to participate and contribute.  We have been talking about how, since we have so many new Christians, that we study a lot of the “basics.”  This group is to help those who have been Christians a little longer really focus on an area in life and make improvements.  I have two other books in Spanish (”Power of a Praying Wife” and another by Dr. James Dobson that I can’t remember right now) so hopefully this will be an ongoing class.  Please keep the success of this new group in your prayers.

The last day of January we took some of the youth to the beach.  These are the kids who committed to and completed reading through the Bible last year.  We are so proud of these guys!!  The water was freezing, but we “suffered” through it and had a blast.

Carolina, Cruz and I have started a sewing class that Carolina’s mom is teaching.  It’s every Saturday, and this past Saturday we learned to take measurements and make a pattern for a blouse. 

I’ve started planting my garden.  One of the things I like about the new house is the yard.  One of the kids from church came over and helped me clean up an area (and I have never seen anyone work as hard as he did!!) so then I had to start planting.  I have a hot pepper plant that is looking good.  I also planted some kind of root (I don’t remember what it’s called).  It’s from the Atlantic coast, and you can use it like a potato but Carolina says it’s much better, so we’ll see.  We also planted pretty red and yellow flowers around the house.  Last week we harvested our first bananas, and they were delicious.  There were a ton, so David sent one of the kids to sell some so he could buy goodies for school.  Now I’m just waiting for my pineapple to produce!! Yum, yum!!

I’m going to teach ladies class today on complaining.  I’m pretty sure this is something we all work to overcome.  I was reading in Ex 16 that when the Israelites complained against Moses they were really complaining against God.  Here, God had directly told Moses what to do, and so their complaints were against Him, but I think this holds true today.  When we complain about anything we are complaining against God.  Doesn’t God have a hand in everything that happens?  Joseph saw this - when his brothers sold him into slavery he knew that it was God’s hand guiding him to be able to save them from starvation.  So then we are going to talk about how complaining is a lack of appreciation for all of the wonderful things God has blessed us with.  If we are focusing and meditating and appreciating the blessings, can we be complaining??  Hebrews talks about how we can’t complain because God will never leave us or forsake us.  With God as our helper, what do we have to fear?  We are also going to talk about how complaining usually means we are ignoring our role in the problem and/or solution.  Maybe we caused the problem, or maybe we didn’t, but can fix it or improve it.  If we are working on a solution, we’ll usually be talking about how things are working out or what we should be doing, instead of complaining.  Finally we’ll talk about the opposite of complaining - contentment.  God has told us how to be content, given us examples, so it’s up to us to put it into practice.