Time to play catch-up...

Well, it has been quite a while now, and I am sure that many of you are either frustrated with our inconsistent blogging patterns, or wandering if we are alive. Sorry, on both accounts...we are not dead. We are quite alive, actually, and have been pretty busy here, with a variety of events (excluding blogging). After Joel's short visit, we were forced to get back to real work going on here, and no longer stayed up at night playing simplistic games like "Hold the chair over your head until your arms feel like they will fall off and the the last man with any strength left in his body wins (see picture below for proof. and laughs).



So, as you know, we began planning tons for our Fall Festival that was coming up. Though we didn't have tons of time to plan and prepare, the Lord was very gracious and helped everything come together, according to his plan. On the Wednesday and Friday, we held bible clubs in 3 seperate houses in the 3 estates we live in/around. About 8-15 primary aged kids attended each house on each of these days, as we taught them about Creation, God's love for them, his plan for their life, and His desire to have a relationship with them. All of this was geared towards the basic theme: Jesus had to die to make you friends of God. During these bible clubs, we taught a basic lesson, played games, made a craft related to the topic, and just hung out with the kids. It was a great opportunity for us to build on the relationships with these kids that we had specifically invited. On the Thursday, we had a big Fall Festival event, where about 30 kids showed up and we played games, learned Bible verses, sang songs, did puppet shows, and ended with a drama of the fall of mankind, leading to Jesus's death. The week ended up being a great time and we trust that the Lord had each kids there that he wanted and that they took something away from it, whether we see the fruit now or not. We were able to see at least 3 kids make professions of faith from the week, and have had multiple great conversations with others since, so praise the Lord!

During this time, my family was also able to come for the week of Halloween, which was a great blessing and encouragement, not only to me, but to all of us here. They were able to help a lot with the events of that week, which was great to have extra and experienced help. My mom made new meals for us, which was great, too! They got to see TONS of incessant fireworks the whole week, especially on Halloween night. Since the 31st was also my sister's 16th birthday, I tried to convince her that I had personally arranged the fireworks for her, but it didn't fly. They also got to walk out late at night and see a lot of the drinking teens out celebrating in numerous ways, including stealing a tool and opening many fire hydrants around the areas, flooding the streets and depleting neighborhoods of water. At the end of the weekend, my family and I went to London for 3 days to visit our family friends who are missionaries there, which was very encouraging! During this time, one of our friends who came to Northern Ireland with us last summer, Ben Harmon, came to visit us during a free weekend he had while studying in Madrid, Spain for the semester. It was great to see him and have a little sense of home and familiarity, which I think he also benefited from.

For the next 3 weeks, we will be leading the junior SU's at Dunclug Secondary School, so please be praying for us. We also are doing a school program at a primary school tomorrow. We are starting to plan for a big Christmas event similar to the Thursday event during the Fall Festival. Also, this week we are going to Belfast on Wednesday and Thursday to shadow an experienced school's group called Crown Jesus Ministries, and see if we can pick anything up to help us. This next weekend, our good friends Will Weir and Brian Sharon are coming to be with us for the whole week of Thanksgiving and we are so excited to have them come. It's slightly more than a month now til we come home for Christmas, and we are getting very excited, but want to maintain our focus until then, so please pray for that. We miss you all so much and really really envy you prayers as we near the end of this season here and continue to seek the Lord's direction in our ministries here. Please try to remember to bring us before the Lord daily, we really need His strength and wisdom! Until the next time my friends...(which likely will be when we see you, at his rate, haha)...
with love...dwight and his roomies....

Here are some pics: