Happy Thanksgiving!!

Greetings friends! We send you very rainy Thanksgiving greetings from Vancouver! Aside from some inspiring messages on church planting earlier in the week, we have been getting into the holiday spirit, venturing out yesterday and finding a small Christmas tree (pictures to come soon!)

Here are some of our encounters this week. You might want to pray that God will give us further encounters with these people and that He will work to prepare their hearts for the gospel:

C -- met on sky train, Muslim
V -- Russian, met on bus, is looking for work, gave our contact info
C -- met at food court in mall, Muslim exchange student, gave our contact info

We are so thankful for all your prayers! Hope you get plenty of turkey and time to be thankful for all God's blessings, for without Him we would have nothing ;)

Week #4 Recap

Well, it's hard to believe we have finished week # 4 and are making our way into week #5. We are continuing to try to followup with each of the people below and we have a few new people:

V -- manages Russian store, orthodox

J  -- lady from Europe, met at ESL class at library, seeking spiritual things

Our training this past week focused on how to begin and sustain a church planting movement, which seems to be very good training especially for when we arrive in Russia. Despite the relatively cold weather and driving rain, we decided to go to an ESL conversation circle on Saturday at our local library. It was a great place to make some new friends and we even got to interact with the group in some spiritual dialogue. Stay tuned for more next week!

Week #3 Recap

We had a great time of ministry this week. God has started to lead us to some people who are interested in hearing more about spiritual things. Here is a list of first initials that you can pray for:

K –  met on bus, Hindu, has read the Bible and is interested in hearing more.

S – dealing with suicide of her daughter and raising her grandson. Was not interested in talking spiritual things at the time but seems like she may be interested in further conversation.

J – young lady who works in mall, interested in further conversation.

H – comes from Catholic background, interested in further conversation.

B – met in gym, Catholic and good conversation about salvation by works versus grace, seems interested in further conversation.

We had a chance to meet with one of our new Russian friends who has been here in Vancouver a couple of years. It was great to work on the few phrases we know and hopefully we were able to help him with his English a bit.

In other news, we went to Grouse Mountain yesterday on our free day. In our attempt to save $60 ($80 total to take the gondola but we only wanted to pay $20 for the ride down) we hiked up a little less than 3,000 feet in an hour and a half.

I think we got the rest of our exercise for the year. Was it worth it? You make the call!