Getting back up to speed!

It was a rude awakening this morning at 5:30 when the alarm company called to say that the alarm was going off at church. I thought, “Oh no, here we go again!”, but thankfully, when I checked things out, everything was in place and no one knows why the alarm went off. Last month the front of the church was spray-painted. I guess we should be thankful that we’d gone a year and a half with not being spray- painted as there are gangs around town that have competitions for the most difficult and daring places to spray.
It’s been busy here this hot rainy summer. There has been so much rain these past couple months, and the church building is leaking badly. Repairman have come and they look at the situation and say it can be resolved, but then they never come back to fix it! All the furniture in the kitchen has been moved to the center of the room because of leaks along the walls.
Then during a wedding at church in December - with the bride and groom, their parents, pastor and ten couples as attendants, all told, twenty-seven people standing on the platform - there were some loud cracks. Checking it out later, we found the whole platform area infested with termites. That’s still to be resolved as well.
Attendance on Sundays at church has, of course, varied during the past couple months with peoples’ summer vacation schedules. But now, with the new school year starting next week, families are returning home and things are getting back to normal. Discipleships are starting up again, and small groups are already in full swing. With our teens returning from vacations and camp, the youth program gets going next Saturday.
As part of a two month sermon series on prayer right now, we will be having a prayer breakfast this weekend. People are getting excited about praying. And many of the new believers are just learning to pray.
Good news! Right now, as I’m writing this, I just received the paperwork closing our old church. We’ve been praying and waiting for this for almost nine months! Now, we can start moving ahead!
Brazil is looking forward to hosting the FIFA World Cup Soccer Tournament in 2014 with games being played all over the country. And then in 2016, Rio will be hosting the summer Olympics. I had told my kids about the cover of the Veja magazine here (similar to Newsweek in the states) of Cristo Redentor (a symbol for Rio and Brazil). Well, here it is.