Hello everyone! Sorry this post is a little later than planned. We ended up going to a church service tonight at Serafin’s church, so we are just arriving back at Rancho now, around 9:30pm. It was a GREAT day today. We got a lot of work done on Pastor Garcia’s house. We put primer on all the outside walls, so that we can paint tomorrow. We also put in new beams and wood on the roof, so that tomorrow we can start with the shingles.

We’ve had some wonderful time together as a team. This morning we started with some worship and devotional time…it’s so rare to have any time alone on mission trips, that I know this was a restful morning for the team.

Thank you so much for your continued prayers! I hope to post again tomorrow evening, so stay tuned!

–Brendan

Greetings Walnut Creek friends! This is Brendan, writing from Rancho Agua Viva in Ensenada. We arrived safe and sound around 3:30 this afternoon and promptly “dibbed” which beds were ours. The American team director here, Ineke, gave us a tour of the grounds and told us the story behind how Rancho got started. One of the things that came out in that time is that 20 people from our team have never been here before. How cool is that? So exciting to be part of such a new experience for our team. And only two of us came on 209′s last Mexico trip 18 months ago, so this is foreign territory for many of us.

We have some free time this evening before dinner, and then a campfire where we will get to meet some of the seminary students who live on the grounds as well as hear more of the story of Rancho Agua Viva. Then it’s an early night to bed, because have some ministry to do in the morning!

Thanks so much for your prayers for our safe travel and team connection. We would love continued prayer for those things, but please also pray for our spirits to stay high. Now that we’re here, everyone is excited for ministry tomorrow; we don’t want to lose that feeling! Right about now is when people start to feel worn down, so pray that we keep our energy up and continue to be gracious with one another as we live together for the week.

I’ll be posting again tomorrow evening around 5:30, so check back in a little after that! Hopefully I’ll have some good stories from the day to share with all our family and friends stateside.

–Brendan

Hello from Fullerton! We’ve arrived safely and are settled in at the church. We had some tasty pizza for dinner and now the students are playing some basketball in the gym and some are getting ready for bed. Tomorrow is our latest start; sleep in until 8! We will cross the border about 1 and arrive at Rancho at about 4.

We’ve been lucky so far in terms of weather and traffic; we would love prayers for that to continue! But more importantly please pray that the connections being made would continue so that our team feels ready to minister to the people of Ensenada.

–Brendan