The house church network that we are a part of was started a little over a year ago and since then it seems that every Sunday God gives Benay and I a little something special from Him. Sometimes it's obvious (a person celebrating with us for the first time, a person encouraging another, a person sharing what the Spirit has put on his/her heart during our worship time, etc) and sometimes it's something that only one of us caught and it's shared with the other later, but it happens every Sunday. We've begun to call these special things our "Sunday present" from Him.
We wanted to share yesterday's present.
The thing I love about house church is that it can change from week to week as needed. It morphs as the Spirit directs. Yesterday we morphed as one of our brothers was suffering. Our brother Garigran was hurting as his mom died in her sleep Saturday morning. Her funeral was yesterday morning. (For more on Brasilian funerals click here to read our teammate Jennifer's thoughts after she went to her first one) So, instead of having house church in our house we became mobile again and took house church to Garigran. The weather was really bad (it literally rained the entire day) and the cemetery was about 30 minutes outside of town so not everyone was able to make the trip but we did have people from 3 different house churches there to love on our brother. Please remember Garigran in your prayers.
Our present for the day came on the drive out to the cemetery. Giu was with us in our car. He was sitting in the front with me and he began telling me a story from last week at school. If you remember, Bronwyn is president of the student council for her school. She has a cabinet and some of her best buds are on the cabinet. Anyway, this past week they had a meeting with the director of the school about a party that they wanted to have. Everyone was nervous as this director can be pretty unfriendly at times. Giu got there first with Julia (Bronwyn's best friend at school) and Lana. These girls have been a couple of times to house church and a couple of times to our celebrations but haven't committed themselves to a relationship with Christ yet.
As they were sitting in the director's waiting room, Giu talked about how nervous he was and the girls admitted that they were too. Giu then tells them that they need to pray about the meeting and his prayer comes in the form of songs that we sing during house church. He then encourages them to sing as well and before you know it, the three of them are singing Christian songs in the director's office while waiting for the meeting. Giu told me it was exciting because they were singing with faith. He then told me that the director had never been nicer in a meeting than she was in last week's meeting. We talked about how God had answered their prayers with taking their nervousness away and changing the director's disposition.
Later, at the funeral, I shared the story with a couple of my brothers in Christ. We agreed that we were definitely NOT like Giu when we were 17. He's got a searching heart for the Lord.
We shared, in last week's blog about Giu, that we felt God would use Bronwyn, Giu and Ansley to make a kingdom difference in their school. Praise God that He is already using these guys to share His love for their friends.
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