Coming Soon...

An update is long overdue from me.  I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year.  I spent mine away from my family for the first time.  Thankfully, I was surrounded by my second family here in Brazil.  I also was blessed to have a friend, Rachel, from the States stay with me for almost a month.  It was nice to have company.  Rachel and I had a lot of fun together and now I am adjusting to life without her here.  I wanted to use this blog entry to talk more about what is coming up in 2009.

Thursday, starts the bi-annual PAZ Leadership Conference.  This is a 5 day conference at our campgrounds in Alter do Chão with leaders from all of the PAZ bases.  We will have morning and evening sessions with a speaker from South Africa (yay for preaching in English haha).  I am really looking forward to this time with leaders from all over the Amazon Basin of Brazil.  There should be about 400 or so in attendance I believe.  When I return from this conference, we have one day back at home and then all of the American missionaries have a retreat for a couple of days.  So starting on Thursday, I will be gone for about a week and a half.  The theme for the leadership conference is faith.  We are getting ready to launch a new campaign of 1000 churches by 2014.  We currently have 500.  The conference will be a great time to catch more of the vision for the Amazon and to increase our faith.  

Another exciting thing about this year, is that it looks like I will be traveling quite a bit to help with translating.  I guess that is a testimony to the Lord's faithfulness in regard to my portuguese.  It is almost certain that I will be going on a 9 day medical trip sometime in the beginning of February.  There are several doctors that are needing some type of internship credit that will be coming from the US and they will each need their own translator.  I am really excited to get out on the river.  Since I have been back there have not been many boat trips so I am excited for the opportunity to go in February.  Also, it is exciting because my leadership is wanting me to travel more this year as we will have many trips.  So in 2009, I am looking forward to getting more involved and being more hands on here in the Amazon.

Thank you all so much for your prayers and support.  Please let me know of any prayer requests you all may have.  I want to be standing and believing with each of you just as you do with me!  God Bless and may the Lord reveal His heart and desires for each of you in 2009!