Progress

I know I've expressed some frustration in feeling like I'm not doing much 'ministry' outside of relationship building, but I think I'm finally making some progress :) As many of you know, Nick and I worked with the youth at our churches back in the states, and I truly treasure those relationships we've built over the years.  It's been almost a year of not working with teenage girls, and I'm super excited to announce I've started doing it again!  I've been meeting on Wednesday afternoons with 3 of the adolescent girls from our local church - for 4 hours each day!  We do crafts, we paint fingernails, they help me with Portuguese, we talk about popular singers (both Brazilian and American), we eat snacks...but most importantly we share testimonies, we memorize Scripture (we've memorized a new verse each week, in Portuguese, of course), and we talk about our faith and our families.  And yesterday, I led them in a Bible study!  We took turns reading sections of 1 Timothy 1, I taught on each section, and they asked questions and gave examples of how they could practice what we talked about.  It was just so exciting to be able to do this completely in Portuguese (they do not know any English) and get a glimpse of what my role here in our language learning town could be :)

Of course, the goal is to begin Bible studies among unbelievers, but I feel this is a good stepping stone.  These girls have so much patience with my language and are so much fun :) Also, since they have a Christian background, they are able to help fill in my vocabulary and ideas that might be foreign to an unbeliever.  And I'm super pumped to announce that two of them feel the Lord leading them to the mission field themselves!

Yesterday we painted signs on wood I found on the side of the road.  Can you guess what they say?