January/February 2009 Newsletter

Greetings Friends!

We are now into 2009 and we trust that each of you had a Merry Christmas and started the New Year with joy in your hearts and lots of hope for the future. We are excited about what the Lord has in store for us this year. Things are incredibly hectic, however the Lord is blessing every day.

We have had several camps over the past few weeks including children, youth and adults, This coming weekend we have a group of ladies arriving for their retreat. The camp itself has been experiencing some ups and downs as far as the infrastructure goes. The construction is going very well and should be finished by the end of next week. Praise the Lord for that. However we have also had some problems in other areas. The motor for the swimming pool pump has been rebuilt twice in the past month or so. We have had what seems to be an endless list of repairs to do. The main water pump for our well has begun to leak oil into the well so we are looking into rebuilding or replacing that pump. Today we installed a temporary pump that we borrowed for the next week or so until we figure out what to do. Every time something seems to go wrong, the Lord seems to send a blessing from another angle.

Please continue to pray for these concerns. God is always faithful.


PRAISES AND TESTIMONIES

Those of you who have been to Paraguay in the last 2 years have probably met Rosa. Rosa is a wonderful neighbor lady who worked part time in the children’s home. She is a single mom with 7 children and extremely poor. Rosa’s youngest daughter, Rosa Catalina, was diagnosed with Leukemia and diabetes. Rosa brought her daughter to church for prayer after not attending for some time. We prayed over her in church, and in children’s church, Gwen had all the children lay hands on her.

Rosa Catalina went for her scheduled check-up before her transfusion. Realizing the poverty of Rosa the doctor did an unheard of thing, he personally paid for the tests to be done. When the results came back from the lab the doctor couldn’t believe it--Rosa Catalina didn’t need a transfusion. She was healed of Leukemia!!! God didn’t stop there, they did further tests 2 weeks later …she doesn’t have diabetes anymore either. That doctor was so excited that she picked up Rosa Catalina and spun her around, and gave Rosa some money to buy her daughter some new clothes for Christmas. Rosa is so on fire about what God did for her daughter that she is telling her testimony to everyone that she sees!


HOGAR PUERTO SEGURO

Christmas isn’t Christmas to me (Gwen) without hearing children sing or do a Christmas skit, so I decided our children should do something. With the help of one of the ladies from the church, the children, 25 in total, acted out the Christmas story. After the nativity story the girls did a choreography to a Marcos Witt Christmas song. I was very nervous about it all coming together because every practice with them I struggled to keep them all still and to be doing what they were supposed to do.

The day of the program we divided the kids up into 3 groups with Christie, Kyle and myself each taking a group out into the neighborhood house to house to invite everyone to come and see the “Living Nativity” that evening. It was an incredibly hot day and I was concerned that the neighbors wouldn’t want to sit in the hot sun on our soccer field. About an hour before the program the sky filled with black clouds and a wonderful cool breeze picked up. We all started to pray that the rain would hold off and that the people would still come.

We had 35 neighbors come to watch the program. The children did a fantastic job!!! To top it off, about half an hour after the program, it started to rain. God held off the rain enough for us to tear down, put everything away and to allow all of our neighbors time to walk home. God is so good!

Kyle enjoyed the program so much that he put together and directed a second drama with the youth from the children’s home, which they presented for our national youth camp. It too was extremely well done, and many were blessed by this ministry.

ITAGUA--HOME OF NEW HOPE

“The Home of New Hope” is now full and functioning very well. Agusto, one of the boys , returned to live with his mother and step-father, leaving us with 8 children in total in the middle of January. However, there is no shortage of abandoned children . During the past week, we received two new boys to our home. Their names are Miguel Angel and Miguel Amado, and as funny as it seems, neither of them want to be called by their first names. So we now have Angel and Amado completing our home with five boys and five girls. The two new boys are adapting very well.

Yesterday (Tuesday) I took all of the children from the home, the house parents, and the wife and child of the property caretaker, to lunch and the movies. The movie they selected to see was “Madagasgar 2”. It was a wonderful experience again watching the faces of the kids as they walked in and saw the big screen, however that was not the highlight. Lunch was not a big deal, even though for most of them it was their first time in a mall. The highlight was the escalator once again. Stairs that go up and down on their own, that was the fun part of the day for them.

MISSIONS SCHOOL

Ken and Christie have began working on preparations for our missions school that will open in May/June of 2009 right here in Paraguay. You can follow their blog as well as the webpage they now have set up for the school using the following links:
www.hagermans.blogspot.com
www.tapemissions.org

All of the pertinent information is being uploaded to the website as we have it ready.

If you have any interest or need information that is not on the webpage yet, please feel free to contact me or them through the above links.

THANK YOU

We are still very grateful for your continued support, both prayerfully and financially. It really is making a difference in the lives of the children in our homes, in our lives, and in the lives of many people in our community. We thank you and are praying for you and your local churches.

RECOMMENDED READING

I have been focusing on the books of Joshua and Nehemiah over the past several months. I also want to Recommend a book that I am now reading for the second time called “The God Who Hung on the Cross” by Dois I JR. Rosser. It is available on Amazon.com.

Blessings From The Millers