The Hills Roll On

Coming soon! Gavin’s personal journal

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!

Last week many of our American friends across this big ol’ world we on our minds.  It was Yanksgiving day of course!  We had celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving back in October with our supervisors since they were going to be travelling on Yanksgiving.  Our 3 weeks "on our own" (our supervisors were in Minneapolis most of Novemberfor their daughter’s wedding) was quickly drawing to a close.  To our delight, we got a st retch of 3 blue-sky days.  Very rare in late November!  The first 2 Gavin was working with "Vidas Restauradas" (Restored Lives: a general repair ministry that gives recovering addicts a fresh start, opportunity to learn skills, and a chance to show the community howJesus transformed them).  So by day 3 we were sur prised by yet another blue sky day!  We had to  take advantage of it…we’d only have our supervisors little red European car for a few more days!  Eden is on a really predictable schedule now so we packed up the car and hit the road! 

The town we live in, Noia, is at the far end of an inlet off the Atlantic on the North Westernmost coast of Spain.   On the left is  the view to the West if you lean right out our livingroom window.  The hills in the horizon continue north  90 minutes up the coast until you get to the North Westernmost corner of all of Europe.  Quaint Spanish Towns, farms, and sandy beaches dot the coastline…truly a spectacular drive.

The absolute most North Westermost point of all of Europe is known as [i]Finisterre: [i]: "The End of the Earth".  For centuries (millenia even?) this jutting peninsula was believed to be, quite literally, the End of the (Olde) World.  The Atlantic covers the horizon as far as the eye can see.  Before the discovery that the world was round, it was believed that if you sailed out past the sight of the shore, you’d eventually fall off the edge of the ‘flat’ world.  Freaky. 

After 2 hours of winding our way up the coast we finally came to it…Finisterre (End of the Earth).  Cold ocean air whipped our faces, the ocean spead out before us glittering gold and navy blue.  We were standing on ancient ground, where countless pilgrims had gone before us.  We’ll share more in a later post about the Pilgrimages (fascinating!!!)…but for now, we just wanted to tell all our American friends that we love you, miss you and were thinking of you as we enjoyed our first ever ocean side family picnic on your Turkey Day.  And to all our Canadian family and friends, we waved to the Western horizon and sent our kisses all the way across the Atlantic to you.  We strained to see the East coast of Canada, but it was a wee bit too far.

Dos besos (two kisses),

Los Hills 

ps..Eden discovered the delight of squishing sand in your hands that day too