{"id":3165,"date":"2018-05-10T16:03:44","date_gmt":"2018-05-10T16:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/?p=3165"},"modified":"2018-05-10T16:03:44","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T16:03:44","slug":"may-prayer-letter-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/?p=3165","title":{"rendered":"May Prayer Letter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Pascua
\n<\/b>This past month, here in Bolivia, we had a special holiday called Pascua. Pascua is the Spanish word for Easter, but here, like in many latin countries, Easter is celebrated very differently. Since it is a predominantly Catholic country, the emphasis is not put on Easter Sunday or the resurrection, but on the week leading up to the death of Christ. Here it is called Semana Santa and Viernes Santo, which is Holy Week and Good Friday. In Latin America the holiday is closely related to Carnaval which comes from the Spanish word \u201ccarne\u201d which means flesh. Carnival is when many give in to their fleshly desires and do pretty much what ever they want. Then forty days later is Holy week where they pay for all their sins from Carnaval. There are several activities during Holy week where they remember Jesus\u2019 arrival to Jerusalem, His betrayal, but especially Friday where they remember His death. On Friday they are not allowed to eat red meat, so almost everyone eats fish instead. Then on Sunday there is very little celebration because they don\u2019t really understand the significance of His resurrection. This is especially sad because we know that it is the resurrection of Jesus that completes the gospel and makes way for our victory over death. Please pray as we seek to teach the people about His glorious resurrection.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Time passes:
\n<\/b>It is truly amazing to see how quickly time passes and how quickly our children are growing up. This coming June Grace will turn fifteen, Taylor thirteen and this past month was Titus\u2019 birthday and he turned nine. He is definitely all boy because for his birthday he wanted to have a Nerf party with his friends. So we bought cheap Nerf guns for everyone and set up different challenges where they had to shoot targets to get points. The funnest part though was probably to Nerf paint ball course we set up in our yard with obstacles made out of cardboard boxes. They divided up into two teams and had to shoot each other until one team was out of players. They played this for close to an hour and still didn\u2019t want to stop. They had Nerf bullets everywhere and I won\u2019t be surprised if we continue to find them until next year. I am very thankful to the Lord for my children and especially their heart for serving Him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Children\u2019s Day:
\n<\/b>This past month, we also had what is called children\u2019s day, which is celebrated in most schools and most restaurants have special activities and give away free food and treats to all the children. We decided to have a special carnival on that Saturday in the park near our church and invited all the children from the neighborhood. We set up games like magnetic fishing, pop the balloon with darts and obstacle courses. For every game they would get tickets where they could take to the prize table and get prizes. At the end we gave all of them a snack and had them sit while we shared the gospel with them. There were close to fifty in total, counting parents and workers. A couple of the children even came to church they next Sunday. Please pray as we try to reach these children with the gospel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Prayer Requests:
\n<\/b>1. Pray for preparations for our upcoming Family and Youth conferences in July.
\n2. Pray for those in our Bible College as we finish up this semester this month.
\n<\/span>3. Pray for us as we will be traveling to the US for a few weeks the end of this month.
\n4. Pray for our upcoming mother\u2019s day celebration this coming month.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pascua This past month, here in Bolivia, we had a special holiday called Pascua. Pascua is the Spanish word for Easter, but here, like in many latin countries, Easter is celebrated very differently. Since it is a predominantly Catholic country, the emphasis is not put on Easter Sunday or the resurrection, but on the week […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-prayer-letters","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Prayer-Pic.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1JaXV-P3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3165"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3168,"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165\/revisions\/3168"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operationbolivia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}