Manualidades Navidenas

Back in September, the Lord placed on my heart a desire to have an outreach activity at our local Costa Rican church.  Christmas here is a pretty big deal, and the season starts very early as they obviously don't celebrate Thanksgiving.  The idea was to have an afternoon of Christmas crafts where ladies from the church would attend and invite their friends who do not know Christ.  It turned out that the only day we could host the event at the church was the Saturday after Thanksgiving which just happened to be the day my sister and brother-in-law left after their 1.5 week visit.  I felt very much like the Lord was leading me to ask our church back in Atlanta, Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, to partner with us in this event by donating the supplies needed for the crafts.  They gladly said yes, and found a weekly Bible study class who was interested in partnering with us to donate all the materials needed.  Through the generosity of the class, my sister and brother-in-law arrived with tons of supplies and materials...everything we needed and more.  Parts of the next week were spent organizing everything into craft packets for each activity.  By the day of the event, I was pretty tired, but the Lord was faithful to give me strength and endurance.  We ended up having almost 60 ladies attend the event.  We had two craft sessions with a time of cafesito (coffee and pastries) and one of the church ladies gave her testimony and a very clear presentation of the gospel.  Praise the Lord at least one woman chose to accept Christ.  It was a wonderful time of fun, sharing and loving on the ladies.  This has been the first time in a long time that the Lord very clearly placed an idea on my heart of what I can do to help spread His Kingdom.  The feeling of having been used by the Lord to bring people to Himself is a little overwhelming and just really cool.  I praise Him for all that was done at this event and the new sister in Christ we have today.