a microwave... among other things....

(at the professor lunch)

Our team has been extremely blessed over the last couple of weeks. It all started a couple weeks ago with our professors luncheon. This is an annual event that the campus staff here holds for all the professors that help us with the ministry throughout the year. It was and is a great time to say thank you and to serve the professors but also to reflect back on the year and what's happened on campus. For me it was a great time to see how much support Vida Estudiantil has from the professors, non-Christian and Christian alike.

(Eliana, Mariesteli, Karina, Raquel and I at the professors lunch)

2 days after the professors luncheon the sheparding trip came. Steve and Robyn Strongitharm along with their two little boys AND (!!!) our vey own Jessica Fauvelle who was on my Stint team last year came to visit. The purpose of their trip was to bring a Canadian team to encourage our team here. We had a great time meeting up and talking about John 13-15 in our devotional times and about our goals and desires on campus. I learned a lot from Steve and Robyn and it was amazing to have Jessica back with our team. It felt like she was just naturally the seventh stint member which was awesome. We were able to travel to a mountain town called El Valle for a couple days of rest and reflexion. It was a huge blessing to get some down time as a a team but also to look forward and be challenged in my own thinking about my heart for this semester coming up and for the ministry here.

(The Stint team with Christmas goodies from Canada)

(Hiking in El Valle)

We came home for the weekend and were able to take Jessica along with our Stint team across to the other coast of Panama and visit some of the tourist sites there. It was a great day away and again I was amazed at this beautiful country that God has called us to be in.

(Fuerte San Lorenzo on the Caribbean coast)

(The team inside Fuerte San Lorenzo)

Monday morning the team again took off as we headed for a city called Santiago, about 3 hours away from Panama City. As we packed and loaded up again Karina commented that she couldn't help but feel like a traveling missionary. We spent 2 and a half days with the student ministry there. We were able to attend their Christmas party and some of the team had a chance to share their testimonies. It was great to reconnect with Marquis, Joanna and Duby who were on the team when we traveled to the Dominican Republic. We also had a chance to give some training on evangelism and having an eternal perspective and got to spend some time simply hanging out and getting to know the students there better. I was so encouraged by the group there. They seem like such a family and it was cool to meet students that the team had seen come to Christ on the Canadian project in May. Seeing how much they've grown and changed was super encouraging. One of these girls was a girl named Cielo. Cielo had prayed to receive Christ last May and since then she's been sharing her faith and taken a bigger role in VE on campus as she's been bringing her sister and friends out to VE events, and been growing as she spends time in the word and with the ministry in Santiago. God is doing an amazing wonder in her heart!

(Marquis, Jessica and I at the Christmas party in Santiago)

We headed home Wednesday afternoon and were able to make it home in time for the Crossfire Christmas party. Crossfire is the youth ministry at one of the churches we are involved with and I have an awesome group of grade 11 and 12 girls that I work with. The entire Crossfire team of leaders including our youth pastor have been so amazingly supportive of us. We showed up Wednesday and sitting on one of the tables were two microwaves for our team, one for the guys and one for the girls. Our youth pastor Mark had found us 2 microwaves. Now I have no idea where they had come from but it was such a huge encouragement for our team. It was just so neat to see how God provided something so simple for our team but something that we had wanted and hadn't had a chance to get. It was such a blessing for us and such an excitement!

(Juan Carlos and Derek with the new and much loved microwave)

Last night was our Vida Estudiantil Christmas party and as such the wrap-up for this semester and this school year here in Panama. We had a great time of eating together, singing together and remembering all the Christmas is for us. There was an open floor where students had a chance to share their testimonies about their year and how Vida Estudiantil had changed or encouraged them. 2 girls shared about how VE had become a family to them and how they had felt so alone before, like they hadn't had any true friends but how VE had become a place where they knew they were welcome and they knew people were there who cared and were praying for them. Along with hearing this I was simply encouraged to be with the students I knew so well and see both new and old faces. One of these new faces was a young man named Samuel that Derek and Raquel had seen come to Christ at the UTP campus. To meet him and to see his life was such a testimony to what God is doing here in Panama.

(gingerbread houses... I think this was a new experience for all...)

(the boys at the Christmas party)

(and the ladies...)

Merry Christmas!!!!!! I pray that Christ's joy and His blessing would be with you this holiday season.

Immanuel

This is an illustration my friend Jess wrote last year around Christmas time and one that I love.

"I learned about incarnation when I kept a salt water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium I discovered, is no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels and the ammonia content. I pumped in vitamins and antibiotics and sulfa drugs and enough enzymes to make rocks grow. I filtered the water through glass filters and charcoal and exposed it to ultraviolet light. You would think, in view of all the energy expended on their behalf, my fish would at least be grateful. Not so. Every time my shadow loomed over the tank they dove for cover into the nearest shell. The showed me only one emotion, fear. Although I opened the lid and dropped in food on a regular schedule three times a day, they responded to each visit as a sure sign of my design to torture them. I could not convince them of my true concern. To my fish I was deity. I was too large for them and my actions too incomprehensible. My acts of mercy they saw as cruelty; my attempts at healing they viewed as destruction. To change their perceptions, I began to see, would require a form of incarnation. I would have to become a fish and "speak" to them in a language they could understand."

The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"—which means, "God with us."
Matthew 1:23

And this in itself was why Jesus came. There is no other way that we could never have been able to understand how a God so huge could love us and have our best interests at heart. And so our Immanuel came to be with us. A little baby boy. Because we can relate to a child and then to a man. Because we've all been there. The fact that Christ came and masked His deity to be fully man is amazing. I can never quite get my head around it. But my hope and prayer is that this Christmas I would get a fresh understanding of this love, and it would be this love in my heart that would overflow to those around me. And that you too would again begin to realize how much Christ loved you, for him to come to our fish tank as a fish, to show us how much he loved us.