Retired? Hardly

We have now been here for almost a year, and we really only changed occupations, not retired. There are so many opportunities for us to get involved in that we have to be careful which ones we choose. We just want to give you an update of where we are now. Sorry, no pictures this time.

First of all, we finished our four levels of Spanish School and are reasonably proficient. The biggest plus is that people notice we speak with hardly an accent. The biggest issues for us right now are remembering all the vocabulary and verb conjugations. But, "practicar, practicar, practicar", as they keep telling us. As we go through telling about the various things we are involved in you will see that we will get plenty of practice.

Speaking of the language school, in the process of helping them get 501(c)3 status, we have managed to get ourselves on the board of directors and are anxious to help in reformatting of the class materials, with a potential of placing it online, and in promoting the school. For people like us it is the best language training you can get since it is a Spanish language class designed by missionaries for missionaries. So we get a lot of practical application plus the fact that native Mexicans teach phonetics. For anyone wanting to work in a Spanish speaking country, this is the place to learn. The school is Harvest Language School. One of our proteges or "non-biological kids", Jarod Pace, did the website as part of his ministry. Networking with the right people does wonders.

We also teach a Bible Exploration class where we are comparing what the Bible and what New Age have to say. Since this is designed to enlighten New Agers on what the Bible has to say, we do have many energetic and challenging discussions. We are sure everyone comes away exhausted after an hour, but we all come back refreshed and ready for more the following week. This actually is the one English-only project we are involved with at this time.

We have been attending a little Mexican church in the neighboring village of Ixtlahuacan. We knew that eventually we might help out with the worship team in music and the audio/visual aspects of it. But with Spanish class taking up most of our time, we didn't offer to help. A couple of weeks ago we decided to dip our toes in the water and see what we could do. Here, two weeks later, we are fully involved playing bass and keyboard and Nancy singing on Sundays and even at special events! The cool thing is someone came up to Nancy and said that she sang Spanish without a detectable accent. The audio/visual equipment that they have is antiquated, and we have begun to help out getting all of the equipment and presentations and the like up to par. They will be building their own building within the next year and there is a good chance we may be providing inputs on the A/V setup for the new building.

Speaking about building a new church, one of our friends from our church plant in Mountain View sent an e-mail saying he has a "burning" desire to come and help out somehow. Since he is a building contractor in CA we put the word out here. Our task will be to identify the subset of projects that will maximize his stay. Once the church building gets started maybe we can convince him to come back and help there as well.

There is also building that will be taking place soon with a home for boys, Casa Hogar. It turns out that in the village of Chapala there is an orphanage, Love In Action, that is over-filled and the boys are sent back out into the street at age 10. So there is a plan to build a home for boys to alleviate this problem. Clearly there is a great potential for involvement here as well.

Some of you may remember that Walt went on a missions trip with a Christian Jazz Band to Brazil four years ago. Well, we connected with the musical director on, where else, Facebook. We are now in the process of trying to organize a music team of that nature to come down to Guadalajara sometime in the next year. As the host country we would be busy setting up a schedule, hotels, meals, transportation and the like. The beauty of this is that they will come down at no cost to the host country and the musicians are all professional quality wanting to return their talents for Kingdom Work.

Another potential ministry looming on the horizon is in working with a local youth camp. We had mentioned our involvement in the high school camp at our church in CA. Then a couple of weeks ago an e-mail came asking if we could possibly help. I guess 25 years of working at Survival camp and Walt being operations director for 10 years may have some value here.

The lesson we are learning is all those years of training in music, worship leading, Bible Study teaching, camp and all the other things we were involved with were really the training ground for work here in Mexico. So, yes, we have not retired, we have just changed occupations to do the things we were being trained for while we had other jobs. Go figure!!