Devotions and Just a Regular Week of “SO…”

Just a regular couple of weeks with not much too report.

So, Mason and I were in charge of devotionals IN PORTUGUESE one of those weeks. Mason had the 2nd-5th graders and I had PreK-1st. Our theme was the pearl of great price and knowing what our true treasure is.

Mason did an amazing job. The first two days the kids all sat still and were quiet and it was great. He handled himself so well. If he was nervous, you couldn’t tell. His Portuguese is coming along nicely. Then Wednesday came and it was rough. The kids had just gotten disciplined by Joy right before Mason’s lesson but it didn’t help. In addition to the lesson, Mason had made these verse boxes, each box contained a word from their memory verse, and he hid them around campus for a little treasure hunt for the kids. The kids then had to put the words in order to make the verse. The plan was to bring out the treasure box with some candy in it at the end for the kids; which they did not know about. Well, those kids were so rowdy that day and would’t settle down, Mason, very calmly, told them that the game was broke like a puzzle (you gotta use the Portuguese words you know) and he didn’t bring out the treasure box of candy. They will never know what they missed out on. I felt so bad for him. He was so disappointed. I could see it on his face. It was heartbreaking. He had worked so hard and the lesson was really good. I was worried he wouldn’t finish out the week with the same confidence but he did. His persistence payed off and the next day went great. So proud of him.

My Portuguese, however, stinks. I had to read my whole devotional. I even went through and phonetically spelled out all the words I had a hard time pronouncing. It’s tough because I’ve worked with kids for years at church but I speak their language; I have tricks. If the kids get wound up or if the lesson changes directions, I can pivot. Here, my Portuguese isn’t good enough to do that. If I have to go off script, I’m toast. So the lessons were good but I was stressed all week about it. Wednesday was tough for to get the kids to listen, as well. I’m not sure what was going on that day but it was hard. But in the end, the kids had a week of being reminded that the kingdom of God is their true treasure, so I’ll call it a success.

So, the dryer wasn’t broke after all. We scheduled a guy to come out to fix it and, lo and behold, it was the adapter and our outlet, not the dryer. Yay!! I went to replace the outlet myself this time but when I took the faceplace off and pulled the outlet out, I realized something didn’t look right. So, I asked Bartz, Sonia’s husband, to look at it. He’s the one that helped us change the outlet for the microwave. He said the person who wired that outlet made a mess but he was able to get the dryer working. So, we’re rolling with it.

So, remember how I told you we grabbed some Christmas decorations the other day? Well, I only had 30 days to return an item if it didn’t work so I HAD to open everything and make sure nothing was broke. And since, I HAD to check the lights and make sure the branches of the trees worked, I basically had half the decorating done. So it ONLY made sense to just finish the decorating, right? So, Christmas decorating is done at the Cain house in Brazil. And, yes, I do get comments about it when people come in the house. And, no, I’m not embarrassed at all.

So, we have a man staying at Vinde getting some training. His desire is to start a Vinde program in his city, which is about three hours from here. Since, he’s here for ten days we decided to host him at the house along with some of the staff. We had a good evening of fellowship and food.

We were also invited to see a sweet young missionary couple dedicate their baby. They are super nice. They invited us to dinner last week. Interesting note, Meredith is actually from Cartersville. What a small world. So of course, I brought her some good old southern sweet tea for her. (A big thanks to the grandparents for bringing some down). A couple days later, they dropped off a board game for the boys to borrow after they found out the kids didn’t get to bring a lot of games or toys. So thoughtful.

They also let us in on a little secret, well at least to us. There are several mulberry trees around the community that are available for picking. We hadn’t noticed people picking them until after Keith Micheal and Meredith mentioned it and now we see people all the time, especially around the lake, picking berries. The boys love them. This has made our family walks around the lake even better.

So the boys all got haircuts and that was that.