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| Quality Family Time! |
Full of activities both in ministry and personal life, May continues to yield the fruit prayed for by many of you. Thank you! Wonderful doors are opening among the local people here. And in such a simple way. We can speak of new friendships starting and lengthy conversations that spark up naturally at schools' parent meetings, business ventures, grocery shopping and so on.
In addition to our outreaches, it's enough for us to just be with the unreached in everyday activities and they will do "the asking." People want to know who we are and what we do here. So thank you for praying. It is encouraging to know that some of you really take prayer seriously, and that you are praying seriously for us!
Agape Lunch and Pastor Craig
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| I translated for Craig into Italian. That was odd! |
We just so happened to also have an Agape (Pot luck) lunch scheduled for after service that same day, and kid's program put on by our Sunday school class.
The day was full of good fun together in Christ. A joy also to see the kids playing and making use of the new, larger space we have outside. Us big kids, the adults, got down with some ping pong competition too!
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| Getting in line for food. |
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| Even the women were anxious to eat :) |
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| Preparing for the kids' show. |
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| Our class that day with teachers! |
School Fundraiser
Our kids' school asked if we parents could attend a demonstration from a mattress company on Monday evening, May 16. Sounds strange, but there's a demographic to it. And by our attending, the company would donate 600 Euro to the school for the presence of 26 couples. We invited Bob and Lori to help fill the seats, and though we didn't make it to 26 couples, we had 21, and the school was awarded 500 Euro, which is very needed as they do not have money to fix their one-and-only school computer! But the evening was not only about beds and eating together, we mingled as usual and the Lord warmed up new faces to us, bringing an invitation to a BBQ at the house of Luka's classmate too. That will be next Sunday afternoon, May 29, so please keep this, and Alessandro and Francesca in prayer as we deepen our friendship and share the Lord. We had helped this family out previously by keeping their son at our place for two afternoons/evenings during their stressful move. It's great to see the relationship take flight gracefully. Bob and Lori have been invited along too. Amazing how the Lord uses anything and everything when we put ourselves out there in faith. We don't have pics from this night, but wanted to share it with you anyway.
TEC Dinner
As a follow up to The English Club, we regrouped on Wednesday evening, May 18 for a pizza dinner with about 25 of us, students and teachers included. Once again, the Lord prepared the ground for His Word to be sown. The Lord guided our lips in conversation about him and good things took place! Just a few names to continue praying for: Cristina, Emanuela, Marco, Adolfo, Sergio and Mariana.
Teachers' Party
Parents from Matea's class wanted to do something as a "thank you" for the teachers. Can you guess what it was? Yes, Pizza dinner once again. About 45 of us with kids gathered this past Friday evening, May 20. As the Lord would have it, I sat down right in front of a couple of which the husband was a world traveling professional surfer, and so had been to America and other English speaking countries. We talked about life, his Catholic religion, our cultural differences and our ministry. It was good!
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| See, even kids socialize over Pizza. Makes the world go round! |
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| Matea with some of her classmates. Scooter races, yeah! |
We'll soon be getting together in the center for a coffee during one of his work breaks. He's an architect and native to Treviso. Luca and his wife Elisa (not the same Luca and Elisa mentioned in other updates) are the hightlight of the evening, but we also spoke with and exchanged contact info with others. Pray for Roberta too, who would like to get together with us.
Picnic and Carnival
The summit of this month so far was our picnic and kid's fair this past Sunday!
What an awesome and rewarding day it was. Contrary to the weather prognosis, the Lord answered our prayers with clear skies, dry ground and a nice breeze.
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| The fair just taking off, view from the front. |
We brought our church to Parco Margherita and as the pics show, took over a small corner of the field. We had food, fun and fellowship until about 3:30 PM and then began set up for the fair which would invite all the kids in the park. It got pretty full with about 30 kids at one time lining up!
There were ten stations for kids to participate in, and candies were the prizes. Lori Scata was the mastermind who put together the idea and several others helped make it happen by manning the stations, so thank you Bob, Lori, Renata, Rich, Keeley, Tracey, Nino, Eve, Daniel and anyone else I may have forgot to mention.
Folks naturally wanted to know who we were and why we were doing this on our own initiative. We got to share with several people, and at the request for more info about our church, we gave out a bunch of info cards with our location and service times.
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| A brotherly kiss, it's biblical! |
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| The Fair in action. About 10 mins. from now it gets packed! |
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| My beautiful bride ran the coin toss. That's our Luka there! |
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| Keeley ran the beanbag toss. Matea is taking a shot. |
