We're done!

Today was our finals day for our "super-intensive" first term of Spanish. Yay! I even ate a Milky Way to celebrate, haha. For my oral topic I got to talk about Guadalajara, so that went really well. I got a B in the class, but we still have to go back tomorrow to get our grade reports. And our class is going out to eat on Saturday, so that should be fun.

Periodically I feel inexplicably nauseous, like tonight at small group. I think it could be the altitude still - sometimes people take a long time to get over that. But overall I'm doing really well health-wise.

Speaking of small groups, we're going to start having one at our house, primarily for inviting the Let's Start Talking (LST) readers. LST is a program where English speakers help others with their conversational English skills by listening to them read aloud selected passages from the Bible and asking questions about grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension. Best of all, it's totally free for the readers, something that's always very shocking. :) There's a group of three instructors here from Montana. They'll be here for a month, and we'll help follow up with their readers.

If anyone is looking for a book to read, Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne is very thought-provoking. I'll write more about that once I finish. I also really liked Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? He looked at suffering from many angles: how Jesus is a God who chose to suffer with us and to work against it, how God can use suffering as a "mega-phone" to tell humanity that this world isn't how it should be, and also how suffering has a looking-forward value. He also talked about how to respond when you or someone you love is suffering. A new favorite quote: "Faith is believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse."

Ok I think that's about it for now. I'm going to try to get videos up on my facebook this week, maybe I'll figure out a way to share those type of things here too. I've been bad at visually documenting things thus far, but at least our newsletter has a lot of pictures, right? :)

Oh, one more thing, camp starts on Monday and we're having a meeting to hammer out details tomorrow. If you could pray for us, that would be awesome. I've never had to organize camps before, and a lot of us are nervous. Thanks!