Full of Blessings!

We want to share with you a blog about blessings! There are so many!

Donations
This year in the Rock House we are, yet again astounded at how God provides! Twice a week we pick up food donations. Normally the Monday donation is a lot of fruit, coffee, juice, bread, cake mix, sugar, eggs.... many things that we use for the snacks with the kids, teenagers, ladies etc. On Friday we receive vegetables. From these donations we are blessed ourselves as we can take advantage but we open up for the community to come on a Friday afternoon at 5pm to receive. At 3pm there are already some ladies who come to queue up to wait! We are able to bless so many families, many of whom have so little. These last two weeks we were blessed also with a lot of biscuits, the joy we saw in the receivers as this is something many of them are unable to afford! It's such a blessing to be able to bless others! 

We are also blessed by "help" from the community, two young men come every Friday to help collect the donations - "Pedrinho and Julio". This has opened doors to walk along side these two young men and often they are dropping by for a cup of coffee and are offering their help in any way we need!! 

Time to Celebrate
For a number of years now the kids from Ballynahinch Baptist Church have been raising money specifically for the Birthday’s of the kids we work with! This is such a blessing!

The majority of the kids we work with don’t celebrate their birthday at all, most may hear “Happy Birthday” from their family members along with a handshake and maybe a hug on the day! But these kids won’t celebrate their birthday with a cake, with presents, with joy… for them it’s just another day that passes and the only difference is that they will now tell people that they are one year older. Actually many don’t even know when their birthday is!! 

What a blessing that we can share this special date with them. Our plan is, once every two months to do a “birthday party” with cake, balloons and a present for each of the children celebrating their birthday on those two months… this year we were a little slow in getting around to doing this. So we just celebrated all the birthdays from January till May!! What a party it was with lots of celebrating and the cake was so delicious! 

Our team also took some time to pray and ask God to speak specific words for each child celebrating a birthday and we gave these words along with the presents! It was so special to see the smiles and rejoicing of the kids as they received their presents and big hugs from each of our team members! 

Thank you so much to those who made this opportunity happen for these precious kids! 

May God Bless you immensely!

Photography Class

I love taking photos!! So last year for my birthday/Christmas present Nico bought me a good camera... I was super happy! But of course I don't know how to use a camera like this! We have a friend who is a photographer, who asked us for opportunities for him to serve the Rock House, so we jumped at the opportunity to ask him to give some photography classes to me and some other YWAMers who like to take photos. He loved the idea! He has been giving us weekly classes with homework!! What a blessing!

Mum's Visit

It's difficult to live far away from family when you are single, then it gets a little harder when you are married, but the most difficult has been since Lorenzo was born! We were blessed of course with a visit from both sets of grandparents... but it goes by too quickly. To be so far away and not see them more often and for the grandparents it is also so difficult! 

But we were blessed in May with a short 12 day visit from my mum! If only she could be around all the time - she cleans the house, she cooks, she takes care of Lorenzo, even changes the dirty nappies!! But most of all she spends time with Lorenzo... it was so special to see that Lorenzo wasn't strange with my mum, it's like he knew this is "Nana!"  And he loved spending time with her! What a blessing!

Unexpected trip to France for Nico

Nico will be in France from June 26 for 3 weeks (without me and Lorenzo unfortunately) for an application for a status of "VSI" (Volunteer of International Solidarity) with an organisation called Defap (the association approved by the French state for sending volunteers with this special statute) in Paris. Nico's church in Avignon worked for more than 2 years to partnership with Defap . It will allow Nico to be recognised in what he does here by the state and therefore have his rights re-opened to social benefits and pension contributions and it will include me and Lorenzo at least with a health plan. So far we have had a private travel insurance which only covered emergencies under certain conditions. It will be a 3 long weeks away from each other but will help us in the long run since he lost all his rights since he arrived in Brazil 5 years ago. We thank Nico's Church in Avignon which made possible this unexpected trip back to France! Nico will have 4 interviews on Thursday 27th June and if he is accepted, then will complete a 2 weeks course from 1st July to the 12th. He will be back in Brazil on the 13th.

Lorenzo                                                

Well, we can't really write about blessings and not add what a blessing it has been raising Lorenzo! He is such a joy! He loves people, he loves to play, to laugh and we are starting to see a little cheeky personality coming out!! It is so fun to spend time with him and to see what an amazing missionary child he is! haha. Because he loves people he continues to love doing visits in the slum, he loves the kids groups and to see the teenagers and he even loves to see the ladies doing the water aerobics... although this may also be because he wants to jump in the pool with them!! 

He really is a blessing - He still sleeps well, apart from the week that his first tooth appeared!  He eats well... although one thing he doesn't like is brazilian beans! I tell him he is Brazilian so he needs to like them! He doesn't seem interested to crawl, just bum shuffle, but he is crazy to walk, I don't think it will be long before he takes off!! 

When my mum was here we were able to dedicate Lorenzo to the Lord in our Church. It was a lovely service and a great opportunity to be able to do this with at least one family member present!
We are so thankful for this little guy who has been in our life 8 and half months!

Tickets bought

We have bought our tickets to come home!! This is a blessing as we will be able to be in Europe for Lorenzo's first birthday... we will spend September in France and October in Northern Ireland. We are so excited to come home to see everyone - family, friends, church, but also for everyone to meet Lorenzo! 

Of course we are blessed so much more than we can write about in this blog, but I hope that as we feel blessed you can be blessed to read about how God takes care of all of us. We hope that as you read this, that you too can reflect on your life and thank God for all the blessings that you have in your life!