Portugal 2010

Every three years, ABWE holds an All Western European Conference with the purpose of encouragement, refreshment, training and fellowship for the missionaries.  We have been blessed to have just attended our second conference, which was held in Tavira, Portugal.  We left our house on Sunday afternoon, November 21st, to drive to Milan to then catch our flight out.  We made a connection in Lisbon and ran to catch our next flight to Faro.  With three extremely excited but exhausted children we arrived at the hotel and finally got them in to bed around 1am.

The conference did not officially begin until Monday night, so we had the day to explore Tavira and then enjoy some fine Portuguese cuisine for lunch.  Steak on a stone...let's just say, awe-some!  Monday and Thursday were our only rain-free days, so those were our sight-seeing days.  Each morning and evening we had some worship time led by the David Loftis family.  That is always such a highlight for us to worship together in English and tears inevitably came each time.  The mornings were used for training in the essential mission components of church planting, led by staff from the ABWE home office.  The afternoons were always free and usually I tried to get the two little ones to nap while Jonathan either had individual meetings with people or we would go out as a family.  In the evenings we were blessed by Jacob Reynolds, President of the Irish Bible Institute, who gave us "A Fresh Look at Jesus for our Life and Work."

The children were ministered to by a church from California that came to run a program for the kids.  Our kids had a blast singing songs, doing crafts, learning about countries around the world and searching God's word for treasures.  There were "diggin' diggin' for nuggets of gold..."

It was truly a week of great blessing for our family.  Just what we needed in a busy season of ministry.  Some other exciting things came about too that will impact and add to our future ministry and involvement, but I'll save that for another time.

We arrived home last Sunday, November 28.  We were exhausted from having had to get up at 3am to catch our flight home.  And it has taken basically the entire week to catch up on things that awaited our arrival home.

On Thanksgiving Day we had the whole afternoon and evening free.  Therefore, we drove to Huelva, Spain to see the port and the life size replicas of the three ships that Christopher Columbus sailed with when he discovered the new world.  The kids definitely enjoyed climbing and exploring the ships.

I have to leave you with a slideshow because I can't narrow pictures down.  So enjoy our week in pictures.  The captions are not coming up with the slideshow presentation so you might have to click on the slideshow to then view some of the captions I added.