We need your prayers!  A member of the church, Hilda, is scheduled for brain surgery next Thursday.  For a long time she has had really bad headaches, and the doctors always said it was due to a lesion on the brain caused by an accident.  During the past month, she has been much worse, with dizzyness.  She was in the Jinotepe hospital and they transferred her to a critical condition hospital in Managua.  There the doctors discovered what they believe to be a tumor, and they plan to operate next Thursday.  This is a scary thing, but add to it that we are in Nicaragua!  She is a single mom of three, and an active member of the church.  Please keep her and her family in your prayers.

This is Hilda chopping carrots for our congregational meal in March.

People always ask if I’ve been here or there in Nicaragua and my answer is almost always “Nope.”  We don’t get much time to travel, but David and I took a long weekend this weekend to visit Jinotega up in northern Nicaragua.  The weather is cool, like here in San Marcos, but there are lots of mountains (Jinotega is in a valley).  You drive in above the city, so it is very neat to look down over it and see how big it is and how it is organized. 

We went to visit Mision Para Cristo (they have a website, but they are redoing it right now, so it’s out of order), a ten year old mission led by Benny and Donna Baker.  They do such a wide variety of work it’s hard to mentally organize it all.  They build church buildings and support the church so they can hire a preacher.  They build schools and support teachers financially and with materials.  All of the schools they build are required to teach Bible daily.  They support the prison and have vocational training and a Bible Institute in the prison.  They have a Bible institute in the congregation in Jinotega.  They work with maternity homes doing devotionals and crafts, like making blankets and hats for the new babies.  They hold many national events, like nation wide services for all of the church, for ladies, for youth, and conferences for church leaders and their wives.  They also give over 7,000 Christmas gifts to children of the church throughout Nicaragua.  They have medical clinics.  That probably didn’t even scratch the surface of all they do.  This year, they have a few new projects they are working on too: a national Bible bowl, providing water cleaning systems to the indigenous people on the Rio Coco, and they are working on getting materials and Bibles in Moskito for these same people.  The most wonderful part of their work is that all projects have a spiritual aspect to them and are used to reach the lost.  It was so much fun to get to visit this work and see all of the great things that they are doing for the people of Nicaragua, both spiritually and physically.  Please keep them in your prayers that they have continued success.

If you want to see pictures, they are at:

mpc-works.smugmug.com