Dinner

Happy New Year!

This is a picture of Jerod, Alex and Clay as they celebrated New Year's Eve in the village.

I hope this finds everyone doing well! I hope you all have a wonderful year! As I look back on the past year, I can definitely say it was one of the hardest in my life. The hardest and yet, one of the best! We hated what happened to our little Annie and although it was horrible, many of the good things about the year happened as a result of her accident. So we are very thankful for good times and bad times and especially that we serve a God who is good during both times!

We had a wonderful New Year's Eve! We celebrated with friends and ate lamb/sheep. It was a cultural experience to say the least! We had a great night and finally made it to bed at about 2am. The tradition here is for the kids to make pinatas and then fill them and around midnight they start whacking the pinatas. It is a very fun tradition and we will probably keep it as a family tradition no matter where we are! My mother-in-law and nephew were real troopers and they stayed up throughout the festivities. They have had a great time and we have enjoyed them being here! They will be leaving on Saturday. Please pray they will have safe travels.

Speaking of prayer, please also pray for our new believers. This is a very difficult time of year for someone who is trying to stop drinking and change their ways. There is a lot of pressure to drink here and many of our believers are falling into temptation. When someone here drinks, it is usually for one reason, to get drunk. Satan is having fun trying to destroy the lives of many of our friends. Please pray they can find the strength to turn away from their customs and traditions and follow Christ.

Thank you to each one of you who pray for us!

The joy of toys

These girls are some of my favorite! They were soooooo appreciative for their gifts. They kept saying, "Please tell the people in the United States thank you for our toys, we love them!!" I love my job!!

44 people in our home!

We had our Christmas party tonight. It was so wonderful! I have never seen so many laughs and smiles and happiness! We had one family of 6 come for the first time, and we had another man come for the first time as well. We played games and sang songs, we listened to a short story from the Bible and Alex acted it out.

Then we got to do the fun part..... give out presents. It really was something awesome to see! If you have ever made up shoeboxes at Christmas time and wondered what it is like when the children open their presents, I am here to tell you, it is AWESOME!! I have never seen so many children smile and laugh and genuinely be thankful for what they have been given! If I died today, I would count myself as being one of the luckiest people on earth. I have seen a little piece of heaven today! Thank you Katie, Adele, Paula and Ed for making it possible for these children to receive these presents! It really was wonderful! This picture above is about half of the kids who received gifts. God bless you all!

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

We have had a very busy past few days. Greg's mom and our nephew, Clay are here visiting. We celebrated our Christmas with them. Christmas Eve was celebrated with 2 different families from our village. We all went to a church in another town and heard a message from Greg. We all enjoyed it! Afterward we all went out for a very festive dinner of tacos on the side of the road! ;o)

As you can see from the picture of Annie and her doll house, Santa did come and the kids said he did really good picking out presents this year. He was a little more creative this year. The doll house that he made was a true hit, with all 3 of them! ;o) We are having a wonderful time with Grandma and Clay and we are all excited about our party tomorrow night. ( Monday) We will play games tell the story of Jesus' birth, eat cake and they will all receive their shoeboxes filled with gifts. We are soooo excited about giving these gifts out. I will do my best to upload some pictures of this tomorrow. I am sorry I have been slack about writing on here, I have just been a little occupied with other things. I will do better! Love you all! Please pray that all goes well with our party and that we have enough gifts for all of the kids who come. Love you! Missy

Christmas for a child in Mexico

This is a picture of a Purepecha child as she helps her mom sell something like moss.

They use this with their nativity scenes. She was precious!

Annie and her new doll house

Santa was good to Annie!