Good morning, and happy new year! Here, we’re enjoying the new year sleeping in a little, although I couldn’t sleep anymore, and finally got up about 8:45. After our half of an overnight service, We finally got home and got to bed at about 3:00 AM.
As I mentioned before, on Sunday afternoon we had a large evangelistic service in the largest indoor sports coliseum… arena… that we have here in Sucre. Just doing that was quite a jump of faith, because close to 75% of our congregation is traveling. As most of you know, a good amount of our congregation, cell leaders and others are university students. Right now they are on summer vacation, and most of them traveled home or to be with relatives the last few weeks. In any case, it went very well. We met with a few other cell churches, with two main goals. 1) To reach many new people for Christ and 2) To celebrate together the advances that we’ve made throughout the year in reaching this city for him. Well over 1000 people assisted the event, and 65 people received the Lord on Sunday afternoon. It was a great time. Our church was very involved in the activity. I preached, and our worship team played during the celebration at the end of the service.
Last evening we had a partial overnight service celebrating new-year and also our 5th anniversary as a church. We didn’t push this event too much because of how much we tried to get people to come and bring others to the Sunday event, so we mostly had cell leaders attend this, which was great. I shared on the goals that we need to look towards in 2008, and what God is calling us as a church to do.
One of the worst traditions that they have here in Bolivia is that when someone has a birthday, they ALWAYS make them take a bite out of the cake. Of course, they don’t just let them take a bite like that, they always push their head down in the cake and get some on their face. Well, they decided that I had to bite the cake since the church was celebrating its 5th birthday. The problem was that they couldn’t push my head down into it, so they picked it up and just creamed me with it. 
It was good though… 
We hope and pray all is well there. Soon I’ll be posting more pictures of Derrick and the rest of us. Norah has been better this past week, but she is still very weak, so please continue to pray for her! We love you all lots…