August he held a kick-off meeting for all of the volunteers in the children's ministry. The volunteers are involved in either sunday school, AWANA, or the Chinese school. Many of them are involved in multiple ministries, which is great. The kick-off training meeting was extremely successful. We had about 50-60 people in total and they were all excited and motivated for the new year. This years theme is being a piece in God's puzzle. We were challenged to consider the gifts that God has given each of us and how they will play out as we minister to kids. Ben has been encouraged since the meeting seeing the volunteers applying what they learned.
Last Sunday, August 31st, was promotion sunday. The Chinese Church has never had anyone to organize an event for it, so all they would do was have the kids go to their new classrooms. Ben wanted to change that tradition by having an actual ceremony for the kids prior to them moving up to their new classroom. It ended up being a great time and the parents loved it. Ben had each class come up in front of everyone and he talked about their specific class, then he had a picture taken of the entire class with the teachers and the parents of each of the kids. It was a special and momentous time. That is another project that Ben had been working on in order to start the year off with a bang.
AWANA also started this past Friday night. I (Christina) am working with the cubbies, which is the 3-4 year olds. We had a smaller group than normal, but they were a great group nontheless. I will be working with the same kids each week working on their verses and crafts. I also will be doing the puppet show each week that will correspond with the lesson. I had an interesting first week doing the puppets since I had never done them before. I practiced the script before hand, but when I got there that night I was told that I had to hide outside the door and the kids would yell for me to come in. That part went great, but what I wasn't told was that I would be hiding behind a chair. I came waltzing in with the puppet and was quickly told to duck behind a chair. I quickly dropped to the ground behind the chair trying to act as though that is how it was supposed to go. Good thing they are only 3-4 year olds. This next week should go much smoother.
As for the rest of our life outside of Church (which is not much these days) we are doing well. I currently have 3 days left of in-class training before I move on to the mentorship part of my training. I have spent one complete week with my mentor so far and it was great! I will spend my remaining 2 1/2 weeks with her, shadowing all that she does and will graduate on September 29th. Soo... the training portion is winding down and I must say that I am excited about that. Ben and I have also gotten to meet our neighbors in the past couple of weeks. We have some wonderful people living in our neighborhood. We are all in the same boat in the fact that we are new to the neighborhood and dont know anybody. We are all trying to be helpful and generous to eachother in our different needs. For example... we asked a neighbor to borrow their lawn mower and not only did they agree, but the very next morning the husband showed up at our house with it. We are thrilled with our neighborhood and look forward to building upon these new found friendships.
The Lord is doing great things in our lives each day, confirming that He had for us to come to Indiana. We are feeling more and more at home here in our neighborhood, job and church and are grateful to all those who have kept us in their prayers. We will try and post things more often as to not have each of our blogs be so long.
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