January 8-14

On Friday afternoon I traveled to Madrid by train to teach an all-day class on the book of Jeremiah. I had originally planned to drive up with Maribel, but in the end, our car was still in the body shop being repaired from the hail storm back in September when I taught the classes on Ezekiel up in northern Spain. Saturday was full of blessings. There were almost 50 people in the classes, and the Lord blessed the time greatly. It has been a special blessing for me to work on these studies on this special book. The classes began at 9:00 after a great breakfast and finished at 5:00. The time of fellowship was a blessing as well. I was able to see many friends from the Madrid area throughout the day. By 6:30 I was on the train headed back home, and my family was waiting at the station for me when I arrived.

We had good services on Sunday. We had hoped that Maria Eugenia would be back for Sunday, but she was out of town visiting her children. One family visited from Alicante this week. We enjoyed a good time of communion and then the service. I preached from Jeremiah, focusing especially on God's mandate in his calling. In the evening we got together at Lorenzo and Ana Maria's place to start a study about the church. I trust these studies will help focus our activities as a church.

One final blessing: Over the past few weeks my lap-top has slowly been dying. The backlight for the screen has been flickering on and off for a while now, but it finally died, making the screen impossible to see. I was not looking forward to what it would cost to fix the laptop or buy a new one. But in Madrid I was with missionary Marvin Robertson, who had a laptop almost identical to mine, except that he dropped his last year and the processor was not functioning. He allowed me to bring his computer back with me, and I managed to build one good laptop out of the two broken computers. I have to thank the Lord for His help in all of this. There were A LOT of pieces and bunches of tiny screws, but I managed to get them all into place, and my computer is working again!