A double appointment

This week we decided to make appointments with the doctor for both kids. Tabitha wasn't eating well and seemed quite lethargic and it also seemed like a good opportunity to have Oscar checked out as he has had diarrhoea for what seems like forever!

The outcome is that both kids were put on anti-parasitic medicine, Tabitha on a multi-vitamin and Oscar on another medicine to restore his intestinal flora. Both seem to be doing much better already. Perhaps it was all associated with that dirty tank we mentioned a few weeks ago.

VBS and MEFI news

Tomorrow (Monday) is the first day of summer holidays for kids across the city. It is also the first day of the Holiday Bible Club (VBS) at La Loma. The team are hoping for 150 kids. As usual there has been an incredible amount of time spent in making decorations for all of the rooms. Usually we have a team from the UK to help but this year there are no teams so it's a church effort. It always makes us laugh when during the announcements a list of ingredients is read out and people are asked to offer to take them in. We were chosen to take in 6 kilos of chicken breasts (thankfully they're a lot cheaper here than at home).

Please pray that many new contacts will be made with people in the community and that the holiday club will make a huge impact. Pray that God will use the people volunteering their time for His glory and that they will have the stamina and health need to see the week through.

Fidel and Juana will be helping at La Loma though Fidel may do some street work as well. Alex and Paty will be helping with the club at their church (Viveros which was in Santa Monica). On Monday though Paty will help at La Loma and Alex will be taking the guys from La Raza to a soccer tournament. The centre won't be open as usual for the week of course but continue to pray for the kids during the week.

One of the guys called Jonny indicated that he was ready to leave the streets on Friday. He went through his interview but there were complications with getting him to the rehab centre. Unfortunately he had to go back to the streets. We are hoping that he will have been able to get there yesterday but we're not sure what happened. This is a problem that we will have to resolve as it may not be the only time it could occur. Pray for Jonny as he begins the difficult process of leaving the streets and that he will first and foremost find true freedom in Christ.

PS We just heard that Jonny made it to rehab and is settling in.

Great News!!!!!

We are beyond delighted to tell you that the boy we mentioned last week from the church is out of prison!! It was around 1am on Friday morning and an hour later our missionary friends you may know from our other blog as Tio Leroy and Tia Kay were able to go a meet them for tacos.

We are so happy that he is home. He is officially on parole so he will have to go to the prison every week to sign. We're not sure what the days ahead will hold for the family. There are people well qualified within the church movement to be able to offer counselling etc. As God places it on your heart I know that this boy and his family will continue to appreciate your prayers as they readjust and process all that has happened. We pray that though it may be difficult to understand, this situation will somehow be used for God's glory.

Thank you again for your prayers.

Pray hard

Back in March we asked for urgent prayer for a young guy from one of the UNIFAM churches who was mistakenly put in prison. This case has gone on and on and unfortunately we aren't yet seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

Just this week he had a hearing where he wasn't released. He will be sentenced but he may be allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence outside. That decision is in the hands of the police who put him in!

Please pray now for this 16-year old boy. He has suffered in prison but he admits that God has taught him and his family a lot and he even said he was glad for that. Put a note in your diary to remind you to pray for a miracle on Wednesday.

This week in view

I was so encouraged this week at MOPS. We had new mums but what was most wonderful was that some had been invited by others who are obviously enjoying the ministry. The schedule is a little crazy at the moment and so we now have 3 weeks before the next meeting. That's the one I am speaking at so I am busily reading and preparing for that when I have time and energy!

We are also involved in the speaking schedule at the youth camp for the national churches at the end of this month. The up side is that it is a little further along the coast from Acapulco. The down side is that we really aren't sure what is expected of us yet. Hopefully we'll get that sorted soon and then we'll be focused on preparation for that as well. We appreciate your prayers for us in that but also for the youth who will go along. Camp is always a time when amazing things can happen and that is exactly what we want to see for God's glory. There are other people speaking as well so it's exciting to be part of a team.

La Raza had more new people to their service on Thursday night. Others came back again too. Pray for us as we visit during the week and give out literature on the street. This week starts the implementation of praying over and selecting a few of the kids who already come to the day program for extra discipleship and trying to involve them more in the life of the church during the week. "Man looks at the outward appearance but the LORD looks at the heart."

Inspiration

Recently I have been encouraged, challenged and inspired and wanted to share some of the resources with you.

I came across the name Travis Cottrell in a Beth Moore study we missionary ladies have been doing together. I looked him up on itunes and ended up buying one of his albums. It was an utterly fabulous investment. The words are mind blowing and so challenging. Here's an example and perhaps, like me, you'll be downloading and enjoying the blessing of this ministry.

I am a stranger in this place
This world is not my home
I want more than it can give
I am a desert needing rain
I'm thirsty for your voice
The very reason that I live

You are the Word, my one desire
An all consuming living fire
The very breath that I am longing for
My heart is desperate for Your ways
Refine me in Your holy blaze
If that is what it takes to know you more
You are the truth that sets me free
Your word is life to me

Then this week I learned through a fantastic blog I check in on from time to time about a lady who gives her testimony in front of a large audience of ladies knowing that she is weeks away from meeting her Lord. It is just full of deeply profound thoughts from an incredible woman who believes the 4 most important things in the world are 1. To know God, 2. To know yourself, 3. To know the gospel and 4. To know your purpose. I highly recommend that you take one little hour out of the 168 hours you have this week to let your heart be stirred and reminded of your priorities in life as you too seek to grow more like Him.

Graduation

After naps today it was a privilege to go up to be at the graduation of 6 students from our seminary here in Mexico - SEMBIMEX. Here are our Tio Leroy and Tia Kay wearing funny hats!
It was a great service and well attended for these six people who are heavily involved in their churches and beyond.
Continue to pray for the work in the seminary. We want to see it full of people ready to go out into ministry in this vast city which is ripe to harvest. Margaret updates the Mexico field prayer blog weekly with news of ministries, like the seminary, in which we are not directly involved. If you are interested in what goes on here outside of the Agnew world then check it out by clicking here or on the link at the right hand side of this page.

MOPS

The planned start time of MOPS is 10am. I was a little concerned when our first person arrived at 10.15am but we know so well that that is fairly typical here. Anyway, I continued to pray that people would come. The speaker had put a lot of effort into her presentation and I knew it was going to be incredibly beneficial.

It was wonderful to eventually have about 20 there. We continue to get mothers and grandmothers which is great as grandmothers are often very heavily involved in the upbringing of their grandchildren.


It was a very practical morning with lots of examples of things we can do with our kids under different categories e.g. fine motor skills, gross motor skills, mathematics, language. This Thursday we have the second part. Our prayer is that those who were there will go out and encourage their friends to come along. There isn't a direct gospel message in this subject but it is profitable in many ways e.g. interaction of the mothers with their kids, holistic care of the families and trust building.

A visitor

The rainy season is upon us here in Mexico. As it settles we can have rain at any point in the day or night. It lasts for about an hour and apart form that it is still lovely and warm. Soon it will be pretty normal for the rain to come late afternoon every day.

Early on Thursday morning we had very heavy rain. Around 3am I was conscious of a pitter patter. As I became more aware I realised that it wasn't Tabitha coming in for a cuddle. It sounded more like the rain...but it sounded like it was inside. Then it felt like it was on the bed. I flicked my hand over the top of the bedspread. The pitter patter continued and Andrew woke up as I lifted the whole duvet and gave it a shake. When he asked what was wrong I said, "I think there's something running over our bed." I turned on the light and this is what was looking at us...



It's a Jerusalem cricket called a 'cara de niño' here. Though no-one we know has ever been bitten by one everyone has instilled a healthy fear of these nasty little creatures who apparently give a very painful bite.

Needless to say we were both out of the bed pretty quickly and the cara de niño had lost a dimension on the floor. How grateful am I to not be nursing a bite and that the visitor came to our room and not to Oscar or Tabitha's! We continue to praise God for health and safety even in the small and interesting episodes!

La Raza

We have started to 'tighten the belt' on the kids who come. It is always good to reaffirm who is in charge and shake up the routine and everyone was glad of time to go to different places in the centre to do different tasks. Please pray for Paty especially as she is teaching the discipleship class at the moment using special materials that they use in the house churches to train new leaders.

We also have started to take the kids for individual time during the week. Paty and Alex interview on Tuesdays and Fidel and Juanita on Wednesdays. It is our chance to get more involved and challenge those who come to think more deeply about their lives. Please pray with for those times and for the kids. More are leaving the streets but maintaining contact with us.

Work on church is developing well. We have made good contact with some in the area and are planning to meet with them during the week. They may form part of our house church's growth.

We will be holding a Holiday Bible Club (VBS) in August and we are excited to plan to make contact with more in the area. We have even found some other Christians from other UNIFAM churches who have family around the corner from the centre. They want to help us to contact their families. So as we continue to pray, God leads us to those who can help. Thank-you for praying for us and we pray that it will lead to much fruit.

One post week

We're giving you a week to catch up on old posts this week! We're just going to write one post with the week's summary.

The highlights from La Raza...

Early in the week the MEFI team had a big sit down meeting with the supervisory pastor. Unity in the team has always been a fragile subject and it was time to get a lot of misassumptions and bad feeling out on the table this week. In a difficult ministry like this it is inevitable that the enemy will attack on some level and team unity seems to be the weak point at the moment. It is currently the biggest hindrance to handing the ministry over to the church to be completely Mexican-run.

The supervisory pastor (Miguel) did a fantastic job of facilitating with the end result that everyone was able to say what they needed to say and has been able to move forward again. Please pray particularly for Andrew and the part he has to play week by week in keeping the team moving towards that official handover.

Another highlight this week was that some neighbours from the community came into the Thursday evening service. Thanks for your prayers for that. There were some good conversations and we continue to pray that the community around will be impacted with the gospel message.

Other events...

The MOPS team decided that they want to run on an extra few weeks to make up for the loss of time during the flu crisis. That means that I will be giving a talk in a few weeks and would appreciate your prayers for my preparation. Pray with us that mums from the church who haven't made it out yet would get along and benefit from this great program.

We were involved this week in listening to and to some measure counselling several individuals who are passing through tough times. We appreciate your prayers for biblical wisdom in our responses and ability in our Spanish.

La Raza update...(formerly known as 'The Drop in Centre")

This week saw kids from Niños Heroes coming for the first time and they will be regulars. Andrew even saw a kid that he met back in 2001 and hasn't seen since.
The team went round to where the La Raza group lives for a very exciting afternoon. The group there had painted a large mural of 'Saint Death' (or the Grim Reaper to you and me) some time ago but had bought paint and wanted to spruce up the place. The first thing they wanted to do was paint over the mural while asking questions about the Day of the Dead offerings and whether they should or not. It seems that they are putting two and two together and beginning to want to do the godly thing first. We would ask you to pray that soon this would spill over into all areas of their lives. We have been urging them to read the bible together in the evenings too. Praise God for a great atmosphere in the day centre now.
It looks as though more kids are ready to ditch street life so pray for us to be able to maintain the contact through the day program or the Thursday night church services. Andrew had another preach in Spanish on Thursday and a long time to witness to a neighbour at La Raza. He was so interested but didn't want to pray for salvation. He is very eager to come back through. We haven't been able to make the breakthrough that we want yet with the neighbours so please keep praying.

MOPS

We were down in number this week. There were just about ten of us but we had a great morning. You may have heard us talk about Cesar and Irma from Escuadron where Andrew goes once a month. They also ran the Mex-i-Kids group in Chalco. We think they are both wonderful and love spending time with them. Irma spoke on discipline from the life of Hagar and used plenty of real life examples. It was very refreshing and challenging. Her main points were:

Decide what you want for your kid e.g. do you want them to be the top of their class or do you want them to be Godly

Love them and be there for them

Lead them to Christ and pray for them from before they are born.

Thanks for your prayers for Fabiola. She has found a job and the wonderful part is that she was able to choose a morning shift or an evening shift and has chosen the latter so she can continue to be involved in MOPS. I'm sure she still needs our prayers as she goes through this difficult time.

This week's style award...

It's been a week! Let me lay some background here. Tabitha in her innocence has been coming out with some great words this week. Like, "Mummy, do you remember when Jesus was here last morning (which means this morning)?". I take the opportunity to say, "Sweetie, Jesus is always here. We can't see Him but we can talk to Him and He always hears us." And I'm thinking, 'and He sees and hears everything we do and say.'

Then on Tuesday morning we go to a MOPS group close to home. There are 3 stations - one to teach how to style hair (and excited Tabitha gets beautiful hair for the day), one to teach how to cut hair (where I think she spent the rest of her time) and one to teach how to make pretty hair clips (my parking spot for the morning).

Now almost a year ago I went to the hairdressers with Tabitha to get her hair cut (of course). With the words, 'Don't get a fringe cut in!' ringing in my ears we come back and Tabitha has...a fringe. I know, I'm pretty weak really. So for a year now we've been growing down 'that fringe'.

So this Friday I bravely get out the scissors for my first nervous attempt at haircutting. I'm relieved that it hasn't been a complete disaster and that Tabitha's 'fringe' is almost the same length now as the rest of her hair.

Saturday is a new day. Morning activities draw to a close and Mummy goes to the kitchen to make lunch. I return to the living room to get the kids and find Tabitha on the floor, scissors in hand not quite so nervously snip, snip, snipping at her precious hair. Now remember, Jesus is watching and listening....

In my head I think, 'sure everyone does this at some point'. I mean Tabitha's defender of the peace (my mum) even reminds me that I did it myself once. I go straight to Google to calm my frustration by looking for images of other kids who have done the same thing. But even though there are kids crying (obviously after some disciplinary measures) there don't appear to be any that made such a drastic mess as Tabitha (in my view).

Everything calms down, Tabitha has her lunch and both kids go down for a nap. When she wakes up she comes down and says "Look Mummy, I didn't cut my hair!"

"I'm afraid you did sweetie. Let's go and look in the mirror."

"Oh, I look horrible with that hair. We need to get new hair."

Well, we know it will grow... eventually. And as I reminded Tabitha in another teaching moment this week, being a princess is more about what's in the inside than the outside. Let's just say, she's pretty clear that cutting hair is best left to someone else (even be that for a dodgy mummy cut!).

Spring Cleaning

Some missionary friends recently ran a bath and were surprised to find little worms in the water. Subsequently they found out that the water tanks should be cleaned at least once a year. Hmmm... we have lived in our house for over 2 years now and have never cleaned our tank... who knows how long before that it was last cleaned. So we felt it was high time to get it done.

I picked up Juan, a man brave enough and crazy enough to take on the task. He found the water tank (no clue had we of it's location) and opened the lid. His look said it all - we really needed this done! So we got to work emptying the tank. Not a small job as you can see from the depth...
... we could have a group of street kids living down in there!
So I watered the incredibly thirsty lawns and then thought about handing the hose over to our neighbours to water their lawn but instead the house got a clean down with the power hose Juan brought with him. One tank clean it was time to go to the roof and look into the cistern. Dirty too... and were those eggs in the water?!
This tank's not quite so big but thanks to Juan we have clean water...and a clean house. Now we're taking the de-bugging pills and hopefully we'll soon be fighting fit again.

Jumping back in

MOPs didn't restart while we were away. We will have a planning meeting this week with a view to starting again the following week. Please pray that mums will come back, that it will continue to be a blessing and that people will be saved for His glory.

Things are almost back to normal in La Raza. Two of the kids in the most recent wave have already returned home and have been warmly received back into their families. Pray that as the days go by they will be able to resolve the problems that led to their leaving home in the first instance. Services have started on a Thursday night. The kids attending the centre have been advertising to many people in the area. When the MEFI team went out to publicise there were many who had already heard. So far it is only street kids and ex-street kids who have been attending. There were 8 there last week. Please continue to pray that these kids will find Christ and that people from the area would begin to attend as well.

We're back

It's hard to believe we've been back for nearly a week. We left on Monday morning. It was a relief to know that it would just be one flight that day. We had a one night lay-over in Newark. Some great friends from our Scotland days now live not far from Newark and we were more than excited to be able to see them again. We only wish we could have hung out for at least another couple of weeks!

There are some friends from whom you can be separated and when you meet up again it's like as if you had never been apart. Getting together with Jodi and Trevor was just like that. The biggest evidence of the time passed since we were last together was the increased number of kids - they have doubled in number!

The kids got on like they had known each other for ever and we had a lovely time catching up and enjoying the love and support of true friends.

The next day it was back to the airport for two flights to Mexico. Andrew had tried to reserve our places online the night before but for some reason it didn't work and we arrived to find that we were on standby for both flights! We got on the first but were separated. For the second we waited patiently to see if anyone would accept the offer of a free hotel and a travel voucher to free up space for us to get the flight. Thankfully someone did and we arrived into Mexico City and to the welcoming faces of Margaret and Robin on Tuesday evening.

The kids were fantastic on the plane. We got several comments from fellow passengers as to how well they had done. It's always a huge relief. Thank you for your prayers. Tabitha still keeps saying, "This is our house!" She seems happy to be back and has been playing with her neighbour friends. She even went into a class at church today. She has a memory verse to learn for next week...in Spanish! Perhaps we'll get a video of that.

They are adjusting well to the time difference though they have been tired. On Friday Oscar impressively reminded us of old times (both kids had horrible reflux) by puking all over me and the floor of Costco! I think the tiredness was just catching up on him but he's in fine form again now.

We are so grateful for the chance we have had to rest and reflect. My health has definitely benefited and I feel much more normal again!

Here are some photos of our journey taken from the plane. The first is Greenland. What an incredible country!
Somewhere between Greenland and New York...
The volcanoes outside Mexico City and the outskirts in the foreground

On our way

A quick note to say we would appreciate your prayers as we start out on the long journey back to Mexico tomorrow (Monday). We leave in the morning and will stay in Newark tomorrow night. We are delighted to be able to meet up with some great friends who we haven't seen since Tabitha was a little baby.

On Tuesday we fly on to Mexico via Houston. We know that in the past we have been carried by prayer. Pray that the kids will be able to sleep when they need it and for health and stamina for mummy and daddy too.