Our trip to Texas

We were off the reservation last week. We decided a little bit at the last minute to go to "Summit" at Abilene Christian University. If you are not familiar, this is a 4 day series of Bible lectures on a variety of topics. Our friend, Mike, works at ACU as a professor and we crashed at his place. Our main goal was to raise some support and make some contacts. We did attend some lectures, but we also spent a lot of time talking to people about the work in Kayenta. We set up a small and next to everyone else pathetic-looking booth. However, we did have candy so you would hope that that makes up for it! I should add that we are not talking about mints or dum dums or other mockery candy that nobody wants, but solid chocolate!

Enough about sugar- this trip proved very fruitful for us. Abilene, Texas is a 13 hr drive from Kayenta, so this was a little bit risky in terms of the time and money we would spend. Looking over the week- definitley worth it. We went to an Agriculture missions lunch that our friend, Mike, got us into. We learned about all the ways people are spreading Christ through agriculture. Particularly, there is a group called "Healing Hands" that goes to third world countries and teaches them how to farm and preserve food. The presentation was fascinating. Nick got a 5 minute slot to talk about the reservation and some of the challenges. Healing Hands were very interested and by the end of our time at Summit had already decided they wanted to take a trip to the reservation and fund a project there! We had been talking about doing some sort of garden on the property of the church building to help the community, but now it seems like a reality.

We had a lot of fun over the week listening to various lessons, playing scrabble, eating yummy steak and meeting some great people.

First Newsletter

A couple more things

I forgot to tell you that I started the first ever bulletin at Kayenta Church of Christ. I am training another lady who could use some help on her computer skills on how to do it. It's really nice for the members to see all the upcoming events and prayer requests on paper. Nick has been cleaning up the "yard" most of the day. I have been putting together some materials for our support trip in Texas. We are getting ready to have dinner with a member who's been helping Nick with the yard work.

Staying busy!

So, the intent was to keep this as a more day to day activity but it's a lot harder than we thought! It's already been a month. We are going to try to get better at this. I will give you a brief update then give you some more day to day stuff.

The 1st big battle: Consistent classes on Sunday nights for all ages with solid teachers. Nick is building a curriculum and teaching the teenagers. Attendance is very inconsistent, but hopefully will get better as word spreads. I am teaching the elementary age and training a woman from the church to do the same. Nick says that consistency is the word of the month so that's what we're trying to create.

Nick is preaching once a month and leading devotionals on Wednesday. My classes started back up for my masters degree in counseling so that is also keeping me pretty busy. It is a lot of reading, but very interesting!

Last weekend myself and 9 other ladies from the congregation attended a ladies retreat about 4 hrs south of here in Prescott, Az. We had a blast and felt encouraged at the same time. My next goal is to get some regularly scheduled ladies events on the calendar.

So what goes on in between all that you ask? Well, I will give you an example of one of our days in the past week. On Monday, an elder from Payson, Az and his wife were visiting. So, after getting some things done around the house, we had lunch with them. Then we drove out to the edge of town to visit a member who has not been regularly attending. He's been struggling lately and needed some encouragement. Then we went to the "culture center" at the school where another member works. Then we had dinner and spent most of the evening starting to prepare for a support trip next week in Abilene, Texas. In between all that, a family from the church came over to use the internet to get some homework doe so we visited with them a little bit.

Since we are going to Texas next week, we are spending a lot of time this week preparing for it. We are attending the Abilebe lectures and setting up a booth to spread the word about our mission work and hopefully gain some more support.

Thanks for all your prayers, cards and encouragement!