Crowns of Beauty

It’s Saturday afternoon and Joni and I are watching Spanish cartoons. The first week of Resplandecer is now behind us, and quite a week it was! Our average attendance has been between 30 and 35 girls between the ages of 12 and 22. Every day, we begin by reading a chapter of the book of Esther and a Bible study on selected topics within the book. On Tuesday, the girls came over for “La Dia del Pelo” (The day of hair. J) and played with each other’s hair. On Wednesday, we watched “One Night with the King,” at the church and gave flashy tiaras to all the girls. On Thursday, we did color charts to determine the right colors to match the girls’ skin tones, and Joni and I sang a song with Pamela and Evelyn, two of our girls in Spanish. The song is entitled “Un Largo Viaje,” and the translated lyrics go something like this:

For this hour I have arrived, for this moment I was born

In Your eternal purposes I see myself

For this hour I have arrived, though I believe the cost is great

In your plans for today I have found myself

The song fits perfectly with the “For Such A Time As This” theme of the book of Esther, and we even found a YouTube video to the song with clips from “One Night with the King.” We also shared the gospel with the girls on Thursday and had an incredible level of interest. Please pray for these girls to make the initiative step to a relationship with Christ, many of them are extremely close!

We were also very excited to announce the center event of Resplandecer that will take place next Saturday night. We are going to have a formal ball for all of the girls to dress up, come and enjoy themselves! Several weeks ago, a team from Indiana brought about 90 prom dresses to Uruguay. On Friday, we spent about 6 hours fitting girls in dresses, and each one received a dress to take home, wear to the ball and keep as their own! We’ve already heard rumors that several of the girls wore their dresses for the rest of the day on Friday simply because they didn’t want to take them off. We reminded the girls that no matter how beautiful they look in their dresses, there is eternal beauty bestowed upon them by the King of Kings. Oh, and ashes are being replaced by crowns of beauty all around us …

In further news, we have also been working with the church in preparing and serving a meal for children every day. We are in the midst of the July vacations from school, and many children do not have access to lunch when they are out of school. The first day, we had between 30 and 40 children, the next day was almost twice that many! I know they had not prepared meals for that many children, yet we still served liberal portions and even seconds to those who asked for it. At the end, even the 8 of us servers ate a meal as well! If I have ever seen a “5 loaves and 2 fish” incident, this was it. “And they all ate and were satisfied …” This ministry of the church was even featured in the newspapers and on the news this past week!

It’s about time to go play softball with the girls. (Correction: It’s about time for Joni to play softball with the girls and for Amy to stand on the side of the field and cheer for them.) Many blessings, prayer warriors – we couldn’t do it without you.