Wow! What a week. And I don't mean anything spiritual by that : ) Blake has been in a series of training classes this week that have lasted from 8 am to 6 pm. My helper's father passed away over the weekend (and he lives about 1 hour away) and so she was out of town all week. Aleah's school was closed, for some reason, all week too. On top of no help I was feeling yucky from first trimester stuff and we had some terrible weather just about every night that left us without electricity and sometimes water. Boy, I felt like I was barely keeping my head above the water!! But, I did survive to live another day and write another blog. . .

I am glad Shawna let me marry her. What a gal! She did great this week with the temperamental time-bomb that is Aleah. That fiery red her lulls you into thinking she's cute, and you realize it was all a ruse to get you in close so she could get her hands on you . You guys have no idea what a fantastic mother Shawna is, truly amazing. Please continue praying for us, when one of us is weak, the other has to be strong.

As she said, I [Blake] was at a "Follow Jesus" seminar, basically learning how to train trainers. Does that make sense? It is the one thing I realized that all my previous attempts at a small group bible study was missing. I did not follow the example Jesus laid out for me of instilling in others the desire and the tools to immediately train other people. With that one ingredient you can see MULTIPLICATION! If I train 3 people, and then teach them to train 3 people each, and so on and so forth, an exponential growth occurs that could be truly amazing. And the cool thing is, small goals. God's power is truly revealed when we give him our five loaves and two fish, barely a meal, and He can bless it and feed 5,000!! So I don't have to keep beating myself up over the fact that my small group isn't big enough. If it's 2 or 3, that's plenty to begin what God wants us to do. God's success always turns out bigger and better than man's success.

In other news, we baptized some new believers AGAIN this week in one of our main villages. God is truly working there, and it is not hard to see. Here's the story: We went up the mountain about 2 hours earlier than we usually do on Sunday night because we had a planned baptism IN THE VILLAGE. That's in all caps because it is a first!! In the past they've been riding motorcycle down the mountain (1 hour or so) to get dunked in our swimming pool. Well, last week, when we had some new believers who said they were ready for baptism, we told them to begin preparations to do it up in the village. They looked at us kinda funny, talked among themselves for a couple of minutes and said, "Ok." Praise God! So we then pushed the envelope a little and asked if we could have one of the existing believers help us out in the baptism. Again, some more murmuring, "Ok, I'll do it," said one of our oldest believers, and then an affirmative nod from another. Again, Praise God! It was kind of sneaky on our part, because we fully intended to turn it over to them anyways.

So, before the baptism, we were waiting in front of a villagers home, and a wedding was going on next door so there were a lot of people milling about, which is pretty unusual. As we sat, a man walked up and sat down without saying much to anyone. Well, when we finally got him to speak, he said, "I want to become a Christian." We had never actually spoken with him, and none of our folks new him, but he was apparently a relative of one of the believers. When asked why, he said, "Because I have seen the lives of the believers here, and I want my life to be like theirs." Wow! PTL, bigtime. So, as we were getting ready to leave we told him, we'll be right back, you can become a Christian when we get back, and get baptized next week. He said, "If I become a Christian now, I could get baptized now." Well WHAT do you say to that?! I thought of Philip and the unich, "Hey look, there's water! What keeps me from being baptized now?!" So we are thrilled of course, because as one of our staff begins 'loudly' sharing Christ with the man, all of the wedding party that I said were milling about, just stopped and listened. He is making a huge profession of faith right then and there! It was unbelievable, and it was really neat to be right there where God was doing something cool. These will be new ripples that will move throughout the village and I can't wait to see how God uses them next week when we show up again!

Please lift up these new believers, they will absolutely face persecution that we have never faced. One lady was very close to accepting Christ, and asked her husband for permission. He told her that if she believed, he would divorce her. So guess what. She reads her bible in secret. She will have to learn a lot quietly from other believers, and cannot associate with us much. Pray for her. Lord give her the endurance that she needs.