Christmas is Coming…
December has been flying by…no, internship has been flying by. 9 months seemed like such a long time when we started out, but now that we’re here, the days go by in a blink and the weeks feel like days. In September things seemed so big; not only the length of internship, but the size of the things in it. Particularly becoming reasonably fluent in Spanish. Christmas became the mark that we told ourselves to just "hold on until". Not to be to hard on ourselves with Spanish; just hang on until Christmas and see where we were then. It’s 2 days to Christmas now and it’s fair to say that GOD IS AMAZING! He’s always doing more than I could ask or imagine; answering prayers in ways I never would’ve expected. Previous journals on this humble website have tracked some of these answers as they’ve recently unfolded so I won’t detail things here
What’s most on our mind is this Friday night: ‘La Fiesta de Navidad’ = a handful of 12-15 year olds in our apartment, all speaking Spanish. *deep breath!*
Why you ask? Well, this will be to an open house party for the youth of the church (THE as in ONLY not-Catholic church, not just of this denomination, but ANY protestant denom!) are few..like I can count them on 2 hands in total…and of those, only half come to church regularly. So why are we throwing a party for them? Our hearts have been torn for the youth. The church hasn’t had solid leadership for the youth in a while, so things have been disorganized, sporadic, and generally unintentional. The Towners (our supervisors and pastors of the church) wanted us to take over the "youth group" back in September, but we weren’t ready. Now that it’s Dec and we’ve got some language downpat, and God’s been stirring our hearts for the youth, we stepped up and offered to have regular (twice a month) youth get togethers at our apartment. So this Friday we’re capitalizing the fact that we are interesting foreigners with curious North Amercan customs and traditions for this Christian holiday. 
A Christmas party/open house for the youth to kickoff this step forward for the youth group. We’re gonna keep it low key and fun; games, funny gifts, homemade pizza, brownies (they’re gonna LOVE EM!), and a "pelicula divertido!" (fun movie!). 
We’ll share how the party goes after the fact…though give us a few days (it is the Christmas weekend after all!) Your prayers for us as we reach out to these youth are MUCH much much (muchissimo) appreciated!