we are still alive!

OK, so we have officially been here slightly more than 1 week now. In one sense, it feels like we have been here a lot longer than that already, but on the other hand, I look ahead and realize that it has been a short one week out of a whole year we have ahead of us. That is definately a bit overwhelming to think about in many ways, haha, so I just try to forget about all that and go through each day one at a time. I figure thats the best, if you have any better ideas, let me know. The Irish do things differently here so it may have clouded my mind.

Anyways, things have been grand since the last post. We have continued our orientation stuff with Russell and Danielle are beginning to have a much better grasp on understanding the culture, the people, the need, and what our role and daily life will be like. At the same time, we have been very eager to get into the community and begin to make the connections with the people again. The Lord has been so faithful already in helping us to have great opportunities to do just this. Every day, we have just been able to spend a lot of time in the community here in Dunclug, reestablishing old relationships and building new ones. Most of that time has consisted of a lot of football...and...well, just talking with the kids, especially. A lot of the people in this estate, especially the young ones, dont do much with their time. The kids have about one more week of school left. So they do that or sleep in they dont have school. Then, they walk around a lot, congregate and talk, play football, play a little hurling, eat sweets, and then repeat it all. While this is a much slower pace from our normal lives and with far less activity, it has been really cool because we have literally just had tons of time to chill with these people. And each time, the Lord has brought around just the people we needed to spend time with at that moment. I have personally been able to see almost all of my friends from last year's trip, and they are so happy to hear that we are here for a whole year. Today, we spend several hours walking to a river with some kids to jump in the really unimpressive, but very cold water, and then walk back a long time again. But it was so great, and we can see how the Lord is using the times to help us build and strengthen these relationships. Then we had a great tea (dinner) at our new neighbor's house, a young girl names Hayley who is Northern Irish and is helping with Hope and Hillside. It was so awesome to spend that time with her and she cooked a lot better for us then we did for her when we had her over 2 nights ago, I think. Then, as we walked around the estate after tea, which most people do, we ran into tons of more people. John and I, again, played some intense football matches with some of the guys, forming several new, really valuable relationships that we had been praying for. We also had a really cool prayer walk around the estates with the Hope team on Tuesday night, which will become a weekly thing.

Let's see, what else recently? We did our last school assembly with Hope on Tuesday, and it went really well. Then, I spoke at a primary school to the oldest students who were about to move on to secondary school on Monday, which also was a great growing opportunity for me, and went great. Elizabeth did the same at another school yesterday, and John will do the last one on Tuesday. Heres another awesome thing the Lord has recently done: Collin is someone that Joel Brooks, with UCF, formed a relationship with about 7 years ago on their first trip to Northern Ireland, and since then the Lord has pursued Collin until he finally became a believer a while ago. He is now 23, but is very shy and quiet around anyone he doesn't really know- basically any Americans other than Joel. Joel encouraged us to find him and pursue a relationship with him and get him in a Bible Study or something. I had only met Collin once before for about 5 seconds, but we stopped by to see him several nights ago, and he warmly talked with us for about 20 minutes, a huge encouragement. Well, Joel, you won't believe this. Last night, we swung by Collin's house to see if he was home. He and his new friend David were there and quickly invited us in. We ended up staying for almost 3 hours, playing intense games of darts. He is really good and killed us most of the times...we even got to a point in the night where he was throwing darts in between people's fingers, placed on the dart board, and throwing them into smal tomoates people held up in front of it. He was like a whole new person and I think he is just so excited about hanging out with us and we are equally excited! Tomorrow, we are going to Ballykeel to meet him and play football with him. He is going to introduce us to his 7 year old son, and hopefully his brother. So, thats so awesome and he seriously wants to hang out as much as he can, so praise the Lord!

Well, thats most of what has been going on, and we will continue to build on these relationships through any means we can. Since the kids are done with school, we will not do any more school-related things until the fall. There will be summer teams coming that we will help and work with for most of the summer, as well as plenty of other regularly and randomly planned events. The UCF team is coming in July and we are so excited about them coming and will be working closely with them while they are here. The saddest part of our time here so far has been not knowing what happened to our friend from the airport, the Chinaman who knew no english, who we led around for a night. I hope he made it ok.

On Tuesday, our long awaited last intern, Erin, will arrive, and we are sooo excited! So be praying for her, please. Pray this week that the Lord will allow us to form the relationships with the people he wants us to. Pray that we will be sensitive to His voice as he leads us to choose who to start new relationships with and which old ones to work one, and the wisdom for how to do each. Pray that we will each stay in the Word and in step with Jesus so that we will be able to walk with him here, knowing what he wants us to in this needy place. We love you all, please feel free to leave comments, or email us. we love hearing from you. Until next time...