It’s been a wild week as we’ve been busy preparing for our trip to the States (by the way, we leave the province tomorrow to catch a plane on Wednesday!). We’ve been packing our things for the trip as well as packing up most everything else in our house because….drum roll… we are SO blessed to be getting an expansion in our home while we are away. We're getting ready for Baby Boren! We’ve also been meeting with many of the students and friends we’ve been blessed to partner with and train in our time here. We’ve handed off some responsibilities to them and we’re thrilled to see how God will continue to develop confidence and leadership in them while we’re gone. And on top of all this, we’ve continued with our normal schedule. Let’s just say the need for a get-away has hit me hard!

I wanted to blog about a special day we had this week. Some of you may remember a previous blog about the children who live in our neighborhood. As the months have passed, we’ve developed very special relationships with many of these kids. We’ve been blessed to get with them twice a week to walk them through the Bible from creation to Christ. We're currently storying the ministry and life of Jesus. We tell stories, sing songs, play games, and laugh a lot. We also have been helping them memorize verses to go along with some of these key stories to help them really piece the ultimate story of the Bible together. To encourage them to keep up their hard work, a few months ago we told them we'd have a picnic when some of them memorized 10 verses. Picnics are a really special and exciting event here and a few girls really set their eyes on the prize. They’ve been diligently studying and even going to visit their friends to help them learn! The two final stragglers completed the last verse the day before the scheduled picnic. It was such an accomplishment for these 5 girls!

We planned to meet at 9am to walk to a nearby resort for the picnic.

 Here are the girls standing at our gate at 8:20, bags packed, and ready to go! 

 

We occupied them long enough for me to finish cooking the food and we were off!

 We took a million pictures. We played on the 'playground'. And after waiting for the pool to fill up, we ate, we swam, we ate, we swam and we ate some more. They loved it! 

 

I enjoyed the day so much as I played with these sweet girls. We got to see them tell an elderly woman about the reason we were having a picnic. It was so precious to hear one of them pray for our food. And we just loved loving on them. I'm thankful for the opportunity we have to invest in them and I'm anticipating God using them to reach their harder-to-reach families with the good news of Jesus. Please pray for them as we will reach the story of Jesus' death and resurrection shortly after we return from the U.S.   

We hope to see you all during our stay in the States! Stay tuned for more info about our time there.