Worship the LORD with gladness; come before him with joyful songs! Psalm 100:2

Bienvenidos

We began today with a beautiful church service in San Salvador. The pastor and congregation were very welcoming of our team. They allowed us to join them in an incredible hour of beautiful praise and worship music. The congregation worshiped with pure joy to be in the house of the Lord... What a blessing to be a part of their service! They also invited our team member Aaron Garrett to worship on stage with them. He had prepared a beautiful song in both English and Spanish!

 After the praise and worship time, our team took the children for their children's church. Dale & Cathy did a fantastic job of sharing several major events throughout the Bible with their Bible Story dramas. With our wonderful translator Mrs. Jenny they made the perfect team to capture the kids attention and share with them God's love for each and every one! The rest of our group did various crafts with the children and teens and talked more with them about Christ and his love for each and every one of them!

     "What an amazing day! After having so looked forward to being a part of a Starfish trip...we are finally HERE!

     We worshiped together with believers in a different language and style but our Lord is the same and He was glorified!
     Dale and I got to teach the Bible story to two groups of children at the church and they were so precious.
     Then we were off to CIPI, the orphanage with all age children as well as pregnant girls and/or new moms and a special needs group of children.

     After telling the Bible story to the teen age girls and teen moms, some as young as 13, they asked about how long we had been married. When we told them more than 30 years, they asked how in the world we could have been married so long! What a privilege to share with them.

     The sweetest and most touching thing today was watching as Dale played with 3 special needs boys--all had to be tied in their chairs for their own safety, due to their disabilities, but Dale had them all laughing--loudly and with totally abandon! It was great! God is being so glorified here...! I am so thankful to be here!" Cathy Hancock

We spent the afternoon at Cipi where as Cathy said, she and Dale continued to share Bible stories with children of all ages. Carson and Aaron worked with some of the teen mothers on designing beautiful bracelets while Mike and I did animal crafts and face painting with elementary age boys. Then we all spent time with the precious children in the special needs center at Cipi as well. We played, sang, and loved on our precious friends and it was hard to say goodnight after helping feed them dinner. After a short visit with the babies in the cuna, we had to head out for the evening.

Tomorrow we will be back at CIPI for a Celebration! All this week the country of El Salvador is celebrating "National Children's Day." We will have the joy of helping bring in inflatables for them to play on, face painting, plus famous Salvadoran children's personalities to entertain and more!

Please be in prayer that through all of the excitement we can continue to build relationships that allow us to show God's unconditional love to these precious children in need. Pray that they may know that while their earthly father may not be available, their Heavenly Father is always right by their side!

We are so thankful that you have taken your time to follow along and we ask that you take an extra moment of your time to share our blog with someone today... You never know how sharing a quick note may influence someone else to make a positive difference in the life of a child! Whether that person begins to pray, a year from now donates their childs old toys, a few years later volunteers, or maybe in five years decides to adopt... Any one of those could make a drastic change in the life of an orphaned child.