The elections in the United States are starting to heat up, but here in Guatemala they’re finishing. Guatemala’s new president, Otto Perez Molina, was sworn into the office over the weekend. Concerns about the increase in violence in the country due to the drug trade ruled the elections, easily overshadowing the problems with poverty, the economy and education. So Otto, a retired general, won easily.

Please pray for Guatemala. The only true solution to the problems in Guatemala is God, so please ask Him to bring peace to our country!

• CNN Article

Yesterday was Elias’s 21st birthday!

He got some of his favorite foods: fried chicken and tres leches cake! He’s been living with us for a little over a month now, and it was lots of fun to celebrate his birthday with him.

Please keep Elias in your prayers this year! He will be finishing up high school and deciding what to do next, so it’s a very important time for him. We’re very happy to have him in our house, and we pray that we can continuously love him with God’s love, point him to Christ, and live lives that are an example to him.

Thank you so much for your prayers and support for us this past year! It has been an exciting and challenging year as we began ministering in Guatemala. We really needed your prayers, and we are so grateful for your help. Take a look at our Pictures from 2011 page to see everything that’s gone on this past year.

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you.
Colossians 1:3

And we’re excited as we look ahead to 2012! Our prayer for you (and please pray this for us!) is:

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please Him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to His glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of His holy people in the kingdom of light. For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Colossians 1:9-14

Thanks again and Happy New Year!

We’ve been able to relax and celebrate our second anniversary together these past two days. We’re so grateful to God for bringing us together, and we’re even more in love with each other now than we were on our wedding day!

Merry Christmas from all of us here in Guatemala!

Edwin and his sister Jennifer joined us for Christmas, so we had 4 staying with us for the holiday. Christmas is celebrated very differently here in Guatemala compared to the United States. I think that the majority of Americans sing “Silent Night” by candlelight. But here they celebrate Jesus’ birth with LOTS of fireworks! At dusk on Christmas Eve people build small fires in front of their houses and sit around it to chat. At midnight the skies light up and group trembles as an impressive number of fireworks are lit. Then hugs are given to everyone in sight, and everyone goes inside to eat tamales. Afterwards people stay up to talk and goof off until they’re too tired to stay awake any longer. Christmas day they just sleep in then eat more tamales!

Yuli’s family is fabulous, and they had all of us over for the celebration. It touches my heart so deeply that we invited these guys to stay with us because they didn’t have a place to go, and her family welcomes them over and they quickly feel part of the family. I’m so grateful to my in-laws for their love and generosity. New Year’s Eve is just a week away, and everyone’s been invited back again!

A ferris wheel was setup in the center of town that we visited this evening:

Celia and her family came over to our house today for a Christmas party. We’ve been able to visit them at their house through out the year, and we felt that it was time to bring them over to our house. Some fellow workers from Casa Shalom also came to see how the kids were doing, and it was so much fun to have everyone together!

One lady who came to see Celia and her family is Beatriz. She is one of the sweetest ladies that I know! She has children and grandchildren in the United States, and could easily be there with them. But instead she works as a house mother at Casa Shalom and cares for the children. She was Celia’s house mom for years, and so she was excited to come over to see how she’s doing.

Beatriz is also the one who found out about and enrolled Elias in his high school. And she’s working with Benjamin trying to look for employment once he finishes his final high school class. So she was excited to visit us and see how they were doing. Finally, she’s a great friend for my wife, and we’ve been very blessed to have her in our lives!

Elias moved out of Casa Shalom to now live with us! Already almost two weeks have passed, but we’ve been really busy getting him moved in and adjusting to the changes. So I’m finally writing about it. We’re so excited to have him here with us, but even though he’s an adult it feels like a big responsibility.

His Brother Benjamin is also staying with us for the Christmas holiday. All the kids at Casa Shalom leave to stay with different families for Christmas in order to give the workers a chance to visit their own families. So Benjamin is staying with us, and it’s a lot of fun to have him here with his brother!

We’ve been in the USA for the past three weeks, and now we’re back home in Guatemala. It’s been great to get a chance to visit my family and has really been refreshing! It has also been a lot of fun to have Yuli’s niece Heidy travel with us.

Here are our blog posts for November:

• Elections Tomorrow
• Our New President: Otto Perez Molina
• Heidy’s Visa
• On Vacation
• Cesar’s Graduation
• Martin – Updated

Our prayer requests for December:

• Elias, the first of the guys, will be moving in with us on Monday. We’re very excited to have him come live with us, but it will be a busy time of adjustment. We also need to find a desk and a dresser for him.
• We’ll be talking to the other two guys, Benjamin and Cesar, these next few weeks and making plans with them.
• Christmas is coming, and we hope to have Edwin and his sister Jennifer stay with us for a few days to celebrate together.
• Our second wedding anniversary is on the 26th, and we’re going to get away for a little while to celebrate. Pray that we continue to spend the needed time together as a couple as our house gets more crowded!
• We would like to be fully funded for this coming year as more guys come to live with us.

We also have a December newsletter that you can read here.

Thank you so much for your prayers for us this past month! We are very grateful for all of the prayers and support that we’ve received. It’s such an exciting time for us as we start the halfway house. And we need your prayers so that we can clearly hear God’s will.

Brent

We’re now back in Guatemala after a wonderful visit with my family and friends. It was a great time to relax and spend quality time together. And it was so much fun to have Heidy join us and to be able to share my family with her.

But it’s good to be back home, and we’re now preparing for our new house guests that will be arriving very soon! We had a surprise when we arrived that the dirt road in front of our house was all torn up and is in the process of getting paved! It will be a nice change, but we won’t be able to get our car to the house for probably another week.