Our road this morning, This is what we have been fighting since the end of October
I want to wish a happy New Year to each of you from a wet and soggy Mexico. I thrust that you have had a family-filled Christmas season and have enjoyed a wonderful time as you celebrated the passing of 2013 and the arrival of the New Year. 2014! Wow, who would have thunk it?
Theresa and I spent a quiet Christmas day at home and enjoyed simply being together. There was plenty of activity over the week with the visiting of friends and church activities. Also, the guys and I worked on the construction all except Christmas and New Years day. So, we were kept very busy and certainly had no occasion to either be bored or to feel lonely for “home”.
On Sunday night I took Theresa to the Tampico airport in order to catch a 7:00 am flight out of Mexico for Winnipeg. She will be spending two weeks in Manitoba with family. So, I will be batching it alone in Cd. Valles for the next two weeks.
This morning the guys and I headed out to the construction site again amidst heavy rains.
The roadway into the missionary training center farm this morning – the rains just won’t stop, but thank God for the tractor
Truthfully, the rains simply have not stopped for the past months except for several days at a time – just enough to allow things to get some drying before the rain begins again.
As I wrote in my last blog, we did get the floor poured on the 20th of December after being unable to do so since the end of October. This, nearly two-month delay, has thrown every wrench that it is possible to throw into the plans and schedule for the construction project on the missionary training center. We are way behind schedule and very much pressed for time now in order to complete our part before the Ontario team arrives to finish out the interior of the building. However, since we got the floor placed on the 20th, we have been working hard despite continued bad weather conditions.
In fact, we have had almost steady rain since the floor was poured, except for several dry days here and there along the way.
This was the entry onto the training center land this morning. The land is the fenced-off area on the right, and the entry is where the wider gap is in the fence line
This morning we awoke to continuing heavy rains (after one dry day on New Years day – go figure!). We had rain most of the week between Christmas and New Years day as well. So far, for the past several weeks, we have been able to creep our way slowly to the farm site without getting stuck in the soup on the road. However, this morning when we reached one particularly deep mud hole we hit bottom and got hung up on the middle of the van. There was nothing to be done except to trudge back through the muck to a neighbor’s place where we have the tractor sitting, drag out the chain, and pull the van (and other neighbor vehicles) through the muck and slime onto terra firma once more. This enabled us to get in and out from the farm site today.
I am not sure what we will do tomorrow if it keeps raining. But, with the tractor handy and
Making concrete the hard way
a good chain, we know that we can at least get to the farm. Once there, we are good to go since the work now is under the roof of the “galera”. It just makes getting to the site rather nasty.
But, all of that said, things are looking very good on the new building. Working with concrete is slow-slogging, and does not have the satisfying “pizzazz” of working with frame construction. Laying the blocks themselves is relatively fast going, and the daily progress is gratifying. But the concrete beams and supports that must be framed in and poured – all of the concrete mixed on the ground with a shovel and poured into the forms from buckets – is very tedious and back breaking slow work. But we are eating away at the elephant, and slowly but surely we are getting it beat.
With God’s help we will have a building ready when Fred and the team from Listowel Community Church arrive to complete the interior on the 24th of this month.
Pouring the corner beam
Thank you for your prayers for us as we work.
There are a couple of other things of interest to report as well. First of all, on Friday the 10th we will be hosting the alliance of pastors at the Bible Institute for their monthly leadership meeting. I have had the privilege of being a part of this pastoral alliance now for the last several months, and it has been a time of relationship building for the leadership across the churches of the city, cutting across denominational lines. We are privileged to be able to host the next meeting of these pastors in the Bible Institute building, thus giving the work of the Bible schools a higher profile since for most of the pastors we are still a relatively unknown element.
Secondly, there is now a Christian FM radio station located here in Cd. Valles. It
Lunch is served – Javier and the building crew
experimentally began to broadcast about a month ago. Since its first transmitting it has been able to increase its power output and is now broadcasting across a relatively large area of the Huasteca. The Lord willing we will be getting two, one-hour spots on the air on a weekly basis. Javier will probably be the one who will be on the air. The idea is to be able to use the airtime as an evangelistic outreach, but to also be able to promote the Bible Institute, Project LAMBS, and the missionary training center – Casa del Obrero. We realize that whereas it would take us years to visit communities one-by-one to promote the Bible schools, by using this new tool of radio, thousands can hear about the work every week. Please pray with us in this. It is a big commitment. First of all, there will be finances needed for paying for air time. But in reality, it is pretty minimal – amounting to approximately $17.00 dollars per hour of airtime. But the really big commitment will be for Javier to always be able to commit to preparing material for the broadcast. Still, we believe that this is a tool that God has made available for us to use, and that we must make use of it immediately. The timing is unique since it coincides exactly with the time when the missionary training center will be ready to open its doors to staff and students.
The building as it looked when we packed it in this evening after another day of work
In this regard, please continue to pray with us for staffing for the missionary training center. As I have mentioned several times before in previous blogs, this will be a very difficult spot to fill, and it must be God who provides exactly the right couple for the position. We are praying that God will lay it on the hearts of just the right couple to fill this much-needed position quickly so that the missionary training center can begin to fulfill the vision for which it has been birthed.
Well, it is close to midnight and six o’clock comes quicker that I like it to. So I had better get to bed. As always, thank you so much for your love and prayers. We are blessed to have friends like you in our lives.
May God’s richest blessings rest on your lives in this new year,
Steven and Theresa
