April 10, 2012

What a fun Sunday!


Our Easter Sunday started with worship at 10 am. Dan preached about the resurrection of Jesus, but also why it is important to remember Jesus and what he has done for us every Sunday. Without remembering Jesus' death, we have no forgiveness of sins. After worship service, we had a nice potluck with tons of ham and other delicious treats. We cleaned up all of that and had our evening service early at 2 pm. This was pretty neat, because people stayed for the afternoon service that normally wouldn't. Then the craziness began with an Egg Hunt for all ages. Over 300 eggs were hidden behind the church building followed by a water balloon toss and raw egg relay. While Dan was winning the water balloon toss, Nick thought it would be fun to start throwing water balloons at him from every angle. Needless to say, it ended in a pretty wet and fun battle.

April 6, 2012

Parts of February and March Newsletter

The newsletter was really long, so I took out chunks of it for our blog.

February was an exciting month for the growth of the church. I was able to continue some ongoing Bible studies that really have begun to show promise. One of those studies was with Justin Curley. On my birthday, of all days, Justin decided to be baptized. He has grown up around the church and has shown a real passion and boldness in sharing his faith. He’s a young man who has a lot of potential to someday be a tremendous leader in the church here.

Through February and March we held a couple of workdays on the trailer. The end goal is to have Dan move into that trailer and live on the church property. He’s been a real sport as his current living conditions are pretty rough. Until we get the doublewide in livable shape he’s staying in a small camping trailer and using the church buildings office, kitchen and bathroom. With some of the high winds we’ve had already this March we’re lucky Dan didn’t blow into New Mexico. So far this year we’ve lost part of the trailers roof and had an entire section of our chain link fence blow over. The windy season here is challenging to say the least.
In mid-March we had a group of nearly 50 come from the Northwest church of Christ in San Antonio, TX. This was the biggest work group Kayenta has seen since the construction of the building. Josh told me the other day that the biggest work group they ever had was around 25 people. Last year, we had all of our summer groups fall apart so this was essentially our first work group to visit the work since Heidi and I moved here. Hosting our first mission trip group, we basically just didn’t know any better. Planning for that many people is a HUGE undertaking. It was worth every second, but there is no denying it’s a lot of preparation.
The upside of having a group that large is that we accomplished an unbelievable amount of work. In the weeks leading up to the mission trip, we made a list of literally every little thing that could possibly need to be accomplished and we very nearly knocked out the entire list. Inside the trailer they accomplished in one week what would have taken us months. Last year, we were able to plant two garden rows. This year we’ll be planting five. That is exclusively because of the work of this mission trip group. That is a job we could not have done otherwise.
Aside from all of the physical work that they completed, every morning they signed up for time slots throughout the day and then one by one stepped away from the tools and the worksite and went someplace alone to pray. It was amazingly powerful to see prayer become the focus of our day. I regret not taking more time to join in that exercise.

I think that the awesome amount of work they accomplished, combined with their singing and their positive attitudes, their engaging our members who were able to be around, it’s going to have a huge impact on our congregation into the future. We really can’t thank those guys enough for their willingness to come and work and their great example.