Beautiful Feet: October 5, 2015

1st Monday living in Juayua. Charlotte wanted to bake some bread for each of the 3 people who had helped us the most in looking for a house. I washed a large load of dishes in the pila. When we were done we headed out to pick up Cesar and go to the home of Ricardo and Joli for our first planning session on planting the church in Salcoaltitan. Carlos had done most of the preparation for the meeting and he was all set with maps of Salcoaltitan and step by step plans of how to start the church there. We were feeling a little funny because we had not done any of this before we started working in Juayua. At least we can learn from all that he had and that we discussed because we are still in our very early stages also. We are trying to really make Juayua and Salcoaltitan sister congregations since they will be so close to each other. We agreed that any equipment one group had would be used by both. And any events that were held and were successful in one place would then be held in the other with all of us working together as much as possible. Our plan for now is to meet with them on Monday mornings followed by evangelism in Salcoaltitan in the afternoon. Then we will work Tue, Wed, and Friday here in Juayua. As well we have a fairly full day on Saturdays with English class and two studies and a service at 5. And we hope to try to rest some and do some personal things on Thursdays. After we finished the meeting we all went to look at a place that Carlos had found in Salcoaltitan for a possible location for the church there. It was designed to be a church meeting place and was pretty nice. Certainly would be great if we could find such a place in Juayua. Charlotte and I dropped Cesar off at his house and ran home for lunch. We headed out after lunch and went by the small daytime restaurant of the Italian chef. He was having his lunch. We told him about ending up making a deal with the man he was taking us to Thursday, Sept. 24^th. We gave him the bread and said how much we appreciated all his effort. He said the nighttime restaurant that he had in his home where we ate with our group when they were here did not work out so now he only had the really small daytime restaurant. He still said if we had several people who wanted to eat there at one time to let him know and he would make accommodations for us. As we were going down the street we saw the city worker who had helped us look for houses on Thursday and had helped us last spring. He told us he had found another house for us to look at but we said we had already moved in and it was too late to look anymore. We all laughed. Next we went by the older lady who has the hostel on the corner. She was still in poor health and had several health issues she mentioned. She was still very gracious in visiting with us and excited about the bread. We told her we would like to have her over for dinner next Tuesday night but would stop by on Monday to make sure she felt up to it. Last stop was the family who has the flower shop. We visited with them awhile and mentioned that even though we had a house we would probably be looking before too long for a place for our congregation to meet. He said that the small funeral home beside his shop was being vacated and he wants us to come back tomorrow at 6 to look at it. That would be a big step and one we would need to discuss with all our members, but one we will have to make sometime in the future. Even though all our current members are ok with where we are meeting, the culture here is that you do not really have a church building if it is in someone’s home. We had gotten small gifts for many people here but had not had time to give them out so we went over to Regina and Pedro’s to take the gifts. Even though they were not that much they were received with great excitement and through a fair amount of tears Charlotte told Regina of the generosity of our family at Central and that she could have her surgery when she was ready. She said it was a really big decision for her but she has an appointment with her doctor next week and will talk with him about it then. Then we went over to Cesar and Eliza’s and gave them the gifts we had gotten for them. It had been so long since we got back I think they were pretty surprised. To end the day Cesar went with us to pick up Regina and Arnoldo to go to a study at Raul and Anita’s. We studied for 1 ½ hrs. on the permanence of marriage in God’s plan. Seems like Monday’s are going to be pretty full.