Conclusion of September

Well in keeping everyone updated I thought I would write a brief conclusion for the month of September. There's been a lot of activity around here lately and most of it I have yet to write anything about...or if I have then I have also forgotten! So here goes:

This past month has been the craziest of our time here. We have faced some of the many trials that missionaries face during their times abroad. For a little while Kristin and I have been praying together or sharing some prayer requests with each other. In a matter of weeks we have watched God open doors, close doors, and just overall answer our prayers. Some of the answers were not always the ones we wanted, but it's been really nice to see answers and pretty clear ones at that. Some I will share and others we have decided to keep between ourselves.

One of the things we had been praying for was anyone that would bring an air of optomism and get us laughing again. In the words of our camp director Blain "It's hard to be positive and upbeat all the time when you're cleaning toilets". He was right. Just two weeks ago by way of a guy named Jeremy we found laughter again. I know it sounds weird to word it that way, but in all honesty one night Kristin and I found that we had stopped laughing. Gasp I know you all think it's crazy that I would ever stop laughing, but I did, life was just not as funny anymore. So one weekend when we were a bit short staffed Thierry called a friend of his to come fill in for the weekend. The friend was Jeremy, a friend from this past summer. I had actually been praying that this same guy would come back to work here as I remembered how he had connected the summer equipier team and also kept us laughing nonstop. He is also a close friend of the family that worked here in August and we had been telling Kristin tons about him. It was neat for her to get to meet this guy we were all telling stories about. It was also pretty neat because there is no other way to put it than God clearly answered the prayers of both Kristin and myself. And it didn't stop here. Lately we have been praying for a way to worship. It's hard to get to church when you're serving groups on the weekends. This past Sunday we finally got the chance to go to Brignoud with the DEFI students. We also began attending the DEFI chapel and meditations that happen each morning after breakfast. Another answer to prayer was Mike. Mike is from England and besides having a hilarious english accent (yes mike this is me making fun of your accent for the world to see) he is crazy funny. He makes us laugh, jokes around with us, brought some amazing movies and family guy, brought new music on cd!, and is super outgoing. Roll all this into one and he was the type of person we needed to connect to the DEFI students. For a while now we have been mingling and hanging out with the students, but it was not until Mike came last week that we began to become like family. Now we hang out all the time, they ask to help with work, we all spend the evenings playing games and learning to dance and we eat all our meals together. It's so nice to have them here and they are such amazing people. It's neat to mix all the different personalities and see what happens. It's also neat to mix all the countries and see the differences and similarities between us all. My favorite story would have to be Friday night. We had finished work and had joined DEFI for a game of maffia. It was after a very crazy game, probably a bit too much sugar, and some coffee that we decided to learn to dance. Mike knows how to salsa, Hannah knows how to cha cha, Kristin and Justin knew how to waltz. Put them all together and we had a group of pretty decent dance teachers. Of course add the fact that it was midnight and everything is funnier at night and it was a truly amazing evening...and now I can kinda salsa too :)

There is so much other stuff that has been going on around here. Yet as I am beginning to realize unless you live here or talk to us daily there is no way for you to understand everything going on in our lives. Life is sooo busy and there are so many new people to meet and hang out with around here that I feel like I cannot begin to incapsulate everything into a blog. Basically life is incredible, God has been so good and we are seeing his many daily blessings and we continue on...I'm going to include a video and perhaps some pictures from our night of dancing.

O and on another note, it snowed in the mountains the other day. Real legit like knee high snow! I took pictures of course!

Hope you all enjoyed the weekend and are having a good transition back into the work week. For all of you who went to homecoming or participated. Congrats, way to beat Bancroft again!