For this post the theme is "Before and After" because there's lots that's going to happen in the semester that's ahead of us, but we've also had quite a lot happen in December.
We had our big Christmas dinner in which we played Secret Santa and had 45 people sign up to participate! This is a great way to get people involved in the community because we made them investigate who their person was in order to buy them the perfect 5 euro gift ($6.50, so it's kinda limiting... oh well, they're college students). Students like these 4 (pictured below: Anushka, Alberto, Cristina, Naomi), who just started coming around this semester participated and it was great to see them get really excited about it!
We also had our famous International Dinner, where people we have never even seen before show up to share a dish from their country. It's an unbelievable amount of food and a crazy number of people, but it's just another way for our students to get to know each other and bring their friends to En Vivo!
But the stand out moment of December was definitely when we all trekked down to the local river to see our new friend, Samantha, be baptized. What we didn't know before we went on our retreat was that Sam, an American girl who randomly came, had never really had anything to do with God or religion her entire life before coming on our Fall Retreat. In the few weeks after that weekend, she expressed a desire to start reading the Bible which she had never read before, and within a very very short span of time, she realized God had been pursuing her for a while. She wanted to get baptized in Spain, where she started her relationship with Jesus!
It was incredible to have all these students (pictured above) come out to celebrate Sam's baptism, because they all felt like they were part of this journey with her. And guess what, you guys are part of Sam's journey too!
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So fast forward to the "After" part of this update.
In January, students tend to disappear because they are studying for their one exam of the semester. So what we've done is set up a few different ways to try to get them to come out of hiding every once in a while.
These ways consist of free snacks and coffee, free pancakes at night, AND a prayer room! Yes, not all of these things are very similar... but they all appeal to different groups of people. The prayer room is something we did last January also, and we saw that the students really did enjoy having a place to go to pray, and to see that others had been praying there as well.
I believe that it's the best way to start off this semester. With a place where the students, and us as the team, can come and ask God to do his work through us this semester. To ask him to bring his Kingdom down to earth this semester in Salamanca. That's our prayer.
What does the rest of the semester hold?
-Spring Retreat
-Habitat for Humanity trip to Portugal
-Benefit Concerts
-11 Thursday night Bible studies
-12 Devotional lunches
-lots of small groups
Just a few things going on!
Thank you all once again for being faithful supporters and being the people who help make all of this possible. You are the ones that enable us to be able to have a beautiful campus house, to be able to give away free food, to be able to give away Bibles to people like Sam who have never had one, and print out small group materials. There is so much that you are helping with just by being faithful with your money.
As you read through this post, you probably saw some things highlighted, and those are the things that I would love for you to be in prayer for!
Here are a few more photos for your viewing pleasure!
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