I’ll go out of order from my post title… let’s talk about Outreach first…
We’re going to BRAZIL!! We will be in Canapi, in the Alagoas region. We leave somewhere around September 20, and will be there for right around a month. Let the Porteguese language training begin! We’re working weekly on outreach prep, which at this point is learning skits that we will be performing HUNDREDS of times in those 4 weeks! There’s more to outreach prep, that we will find out as the weeks go on… Just as when we came here (we didn’t know too many details ahead of time) we take outreach prep one step at a time.
I need to stop here for a moment and reveal something so awesome I have learned about my husband in the last couple of weeks….
Many of you are familiar with my kids interest in drama. Nolan, Savana & Landon have all participated in the Assemblies of God Fine Arts Competition through our church; Savana, Landon, Lucie and Tessa have been involved in our community theater. Until very recently I believed that their talent was a kind of out-of-the-blue gift… I’m not really into to drama, and neither is Neil…. wait a minute…
It turns out that Neil has quite a gift for drama — he’s volunteered to act in some of the skits we’re learning, and I’m dying! He’s AMAZING!
Last week our topic was Spiritual Warfare. Neil and my week was a little more experiential… After doing a good bit of explaining about the Trinity and the role of the 3 persons of the Trinity — especially the Holy Spirit, whom we have with us — he led us through two powerful sessions of prayer. I felt like we experienced spiritual warfare as much as we learned about it. The kids tackled the same topic in their class, but they focused more on the Armor of God and doing spiritual warfare in the “opposite spirit” (which is basically repaying evil with good — see I Peter 3:9).
Also significant this week, we looked together as a family at the Five Love Languages (Acts of Service, Quality Time, Gifts, Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch) and identified each member of our family’s top two love languages. THEN, we brainstormed ideas of how we could show love to each other in the other’s love languages. This is not a brand new idea to me, but I have never followed through with the exercise of actually identifying the languages in my kids. We then took it to the next level by identifying practical ways to show love to each other. It was such a life-giving exercise for our family.
Our week ended with a visit from my sister Stacie, her husband Mike, and their girls. Stacie and I are loving living ONLY 4 hours apart… Weekend visits have been impossible for the last 20 years with out involving an airplane…. until now 🙂
*As of today, week 6 is in the books! I’m trying to stay on top of my updates, but time ALWAYS FLIES! Hopefully you’ll see another post about this week very soon… We’ll see 🙂
This is so beautiful! God bless your family as you journey where He leads.
More tears of excitement and joy for your family. How incredible you guys are doing this. We love you!! PS- A skit done 100’s of times in 4 weeks? Wow!
It seems like a lot — I don’t know… just going off of what they’ve told us they’ve done on other outreaches… 😉 I actually will clarify a little more in my next post — we are doing a two week stateside outreach (likely to Houston) – and that 100’s of times probably includes many practice runs!