Catching up... Or is it running ahead?

My poor blog! Well, if I have any readers left, I guess you know I’ve been busy and have sorely neglected my blog these days. Week before last we had a missionary at our church and she stayed at our house. I had known her in Brazil, although she has just finished a term in Mozambique and will now be going to Angola. It meant so much to our church to hear her. This Sunday we took up a missions offering and received around $800. We are SO excited. That is really terrific for us. In the summer we had had an offering for Bolivia and gotten around $300, so as João would say “There is hope for us, for where there is a love of missions, certainly God’s people are awake.”
But I get ahead of myself. Or is it behind? At any rate, this past week my mom arrived for a stay and we are having a really good time together, although I can’t think of anything exciting we have done. We just enjoy each other’s company.
Yesterday, Sunday, we had our bilingual service and it went well, although attendance was considerably down. We had so many people out of town. I’m not sure why. In the evening we had the associational meeting at our church. This year we decided to focus on worship and not business. Instead of our usual 30 or so people we must have had well over 100. Our church was packed to overflowing. João said it was so much fun to speak to a really full house. We celebrated the diversity of our churches here by invited various ethnic groups from our Baptist churches to share in the service. We had a children’s Haitian choir to sing – they were so cute in their uniforms. A Burmese choir sang and just knocked our socks off. There were terrific. I kept remembering the suffering of Adoniram Judson (the 18^th century pioneering missionary to Burma) and seeing these, his great-great-great grandchildren (spiritual) and knowing that it’s really all worth it! Our group sang a “samba” arrangement of a Brazilian chorus. We sang hymns in French, Spanish, English and Portuguese. The people from our church read scriptures in about 7 different languages. It was a wonderful evening. I came home tired (I am associational clerk, so I had lots of responsibilities), but so full! What a great way to spend your day. So that’s my blog for today (or is it my blah, blah, blah?)