Christmas outreach at Paihia

 December 2008 

This month as been a special month for us for some of the following reasons:

1) A few days before Christmas, the Filipino printers finally got the Quiet Time booklet produced.

We have heard that those booklets were a great blessing almost immediately as people no longer have to down load QT sheets off the internet.

2) On Christmas Eve our son Jeremy was the keyboard musician at a Christian outreach at Paihia.

(Paihia is about 110 km from where we live at Marsden Point) Our whole family decided to attend. It was a wonderful event, focusing on the birth of Jesus.

3) Christmas Day was also special.

We live with Colin's Mum (Nana) and a number of her other children and their families stay on the property over the Christmas break. Well, we began the day by attending the local church for their Christmas service. Then at lunch time, we had a combined Christmas dinner. There would have been about 40 in attendance. Then in the evening with the other families, we had a time of singing carols, sharing blessings and thanking God for his goodness to us, exchanging modest presents and playing fun games. I feel that our Christmas' are getting better as Jesus is becoming more the focus, rather than the materialism of Christmas. For our family personally, we gave modest presents to each other and prayed and shared together over God's goodness to us.

4) Each day we have continued having a sharing time in our family and we have had 6 cousins from 3 different families join with us.

This has been such an encouragement for our boys and Priscilla, doing QTs and praying and sharing with them.

5) We had Kathy's Mum (Grandma 94) stay with us for over a week and it was a joy to have her with us.

6) We continue to get joy over caring for Nana.

Her toes on her left foot deteriorated slightly in December with Gangrene and at the time of writing this (January 11th) she has been in hospital, seriously ill with an infection in her blood. She has now recovered and will probably be home in a day or two. She wants to live and we feel overjoyed that she will probably be coming home. (I will talk more about this in our January newsletter)

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