Kleefeld EMC Youth!

We just finished up a week with the youth group from our church back home in Canada! 

They have been coming every other year since Dallas and I moved to Mexico, so this was their fourth trip here. The Associate Pastor, Peter, has been with them each time and it's been so great to work together on this from afar and while they're here. 

They came with good attitudes, ready to learn and be involved, and we loved seeing them in action. It's also fun on a personal level to know their parents and older siblings, and to have worked before with those that are now leaders in the group.

I won't get into detail about each and every thing that we did, but here are a few pics to highlight...

The picture above was taken at an orphanage we went to for a day. It is an hours drive from Gdl, out in a small town. It's a Christian children's home and we were blessed to have been connected with them! The "parents" of the home are wonderful people, as are the staff that work with them, and we plan to help them more in the future. This was a positive connection made through Kleefeld having been here.

We also helped with food prep, clean up around the property, and spent a couple of hours with the kids.

playing games

A highlight for us as missionaries were the worship times together most of the evenings....we love Spanish don't get me wrong, but it's special to sing together in English with a group once in a while. Most evenings we also had visitors from our cell groups and connections with us, so it was still always a mixture of English and Spanish voices singing together.

Another thing we did was a kid's event in our neighborhood. We invited neighbor kids and also some friends from other connections. A new family that joined us on Sunday for our Easter celebration also sent their kids to this event, those double connections are good! 

Paulina, a youth in our cell group, invited her friends to the park one afternoon for a youth day. As it is Spring break, many of them were away, but several came and it's been neat to see Paulina take a stand for God with her friends even though she is the only Christian. 

In this pic below, the guys aren't bored on their cell phones :) They are getting them ready to take pictures as we played Egg Roulette!! Our interns, Jesse and Allison, had planned some games, so here they boiled some eggs and left some raw....each person had to take an egg and smash it on their head. Who knows what kind of egg you'll get!!

Besides these times together, we also took them to an Old Folk's home where they made good connections as well, they attended a church Easter celebration, they visited with people they came into contact with, they prayed with us and for us and for Guadalajara, and they saw new things.

Beyond what they did for our ministry and people here, we pray that they also left here having seen God at work - both here and in their own lives and hearts. We pray that their experience will have changed them in little or big ways and that they will remember this time and remember what God said to them while they were here!

These kinds of short trips taught me a lot as a younger person and were things that helped shape me into the person I am today, so I love having the come and being able to invest just a little into the youth of our church!