Busy Weekend-Part 5

That's right. Part 5.

After Anderson's soccer game we went to a birthday party for a 3 year old.

There are places here in our city that are just for parties. People will convert or build a warehouse to make a party place.

These parties are mainly for small children up to 10-12 years of age.

It's a place to play as well as for adults to hang out. The parents of the birthday kid pay a fee and the place provides the food, drinks, games, people to play with the kids while the adults sit at tables, talk and eat the food that they keep bringing out. It's like a mini Disney World.

The best way to explain it is to show you:

As you can see, the kids love a place like this.

Anyway, we were invited to this party by some of our friends, Fabio and Taís. It was a party for their daughter Natália. Here is a picture from that night. Natália is the cute girl (with the checkered dress) in the front looking at the camera.

Why do we share? Because we are only friends with these guys because of our old teammates Sascha and Jennifer.

Sascha and Jennifer met these guys at a restaurant in another city a few years ago. They began talking and found out that they all lived in Porto Alegre.  They became good friends and started hanging out together.

Sascha and Jennifer introduced them to us.

When it came time for Sascha and Jennifer to move back to the states we had a going away party for them. They invited Fabio and Taís to be there as well.

Even as they were getting ready to get on the plane to move away, Sascha and Jennifer were living intentionally. They loved this couple and wanted them to meet our church family. Just because they were moving far away didn't keep them from continuing to do God's work here. They could have easily just shut it down and counted down the days until they left to start a new life in the states. They didn't.

And because of the seed that they planted we continue the friendship with Fabio and Taís.  When Jennifer and her girls came back to Porto Alegre to visit in January of this year, they got together for a visit at our house.

To be honest, it's easy to be around Fabio, Taís and Natália. They are super friendly and fun.

We share to just encourage you to plant and water those seeds that God is giving you. Sascha and Jennifer would have loved to see, with their own eyes, Fabio and Taís give their lives to Christ but the job that God gave them was to plant the seed and share that seed with God's family. They did and now it's up to us to do our watering part.

Maybe we will be blessed to see them give their lives to Christ. Maybe not. But we will do our part to be Christ to them and to continue doing what God tells us to do.

We say it a lot to our Brasilian family, live it ourselves and continue to see it lived out in the lives of Fabio, Taís, Sascha and Jennifer......everything begins with a "hi." God's kingdom grows from "hello." It grows from friendships.

We only know this couple because Sascha and Jennifer said hello and then lived intentionally for Jesus. They didn't stop with the hello, but began a friendship.

We ask that you pray for Fabio and Taís. That one day they will give their lives to Jesus and as they do, they think back to that one "hello" they got from a couple in a restaurant.

And we pray that you live intentionally for Jesus today.

You have no idea where He will take that simple "hi."