Hello everybody!!!  We just wanted to share some of our latest news, since we are happy to report the birth of our new Rehab Center facility, which is still in progress!

We needed a larger facility for our Rehab Center, and we had a few rustic rooms on a property that was bigger than our current one, so we decided to go ahead and start fixing that old property up!

This was really a huge task, but thankfully all of the helpers at the current center were willing to finish out the construction for us without charging for their labor at all!

We were on a good line to move into our new rehab center, and everything was going well –  until a couple of corrupt Mexican officials came knocking at our door!  They wanted money, and that day we learned that the government was suddenly demanding $10,000 pesos a month for some strange fund having to do with a “license” for the rehab center(?!).

Now $10,000 pesos is actually the equivalent of about $500 USD, so if that sounds like a lot of money to have to just  “give” to the government every month simply because you’re running a rehab center, then you are having the same thought that we had…!  In fact in Mexico this is actually an inordinate amount of money to have to give to the government every month(!).

So when the pastor of our Center expressed that he was unable to pay those kinds of monthly “dues,” one government official told him to check his accounts and “see what he could help them with.”

Having left things like that, we were trying to figure out what to do next when a notice came to the door of the center stating that there was a $10,000 “fine” for not having paid the “dues” yet, and our pastor was asked to show up for a 4:00 appointment at the government office downtown.

Not surprisingly though, on that same day at exactly 4:00 (they didn’t wait to see if we would pay the fine!), members of a well-known crooked police division arrived at the door of our center. Knocking our pastor’s wife to the ground, they proceeded to ransack and ‘close’ the center…breaking video cameras, security doors, and bunk beds, and declaring it illegal to enter the building.

Now because of the corruption in the Mexican government, this sort of thing has been known to happen to rehab centers. And when it happens you usually hear about groups of addicts running recklessly down the street and through neighborhoods, all but racing back to the street corners to go back to their addictions!

But you know, when the police came and kicked open the doors of our rehab Center that day, a funny thing happened there…

…Nobody ran out!

Nope.  In fact they just sort of quietly stepped out of the building!

And the amazing part of this story is that, instead of trying to ‘make a break for it,’ the vast majority of the young men coming out of our center decided to just sort of stay there… right out on the street in front of the facility, almost all of them saying that they had no desire to leave, and even encouraging the pastor with words like, “Don’t worry Pastor, we’re not going anywhere!”

Now that certainly sounds like a pretty impressive precedent for a group of addicts kept behind locked doors in an environment designed to keep them off drugs!

… But for right now we will leave it as a story for another time.

The point here is that during those awkward couple of hours when these men were sort of sitting out on the street with nothing to do, we had to figure out what we were going to do! 

And we had a choice to make.  So after thinking for awhile, Larry went and got every last dime out of all of our accounts.

… And then he paid the impossible fines.

Having gotten their money, authorities sent members of the police force back to “reopen”(?) the center that same day.

Then amazingly, the 17 young men who sat bravely out on the street with Larry waiting to go back into the center filed quietly in, and, turning their backs on a final chance to break out running and escape, they allowed those broken doors to be soldered shut behind them.

The next day, even more families brought their young men back to the center once they had heard that it reopened, and we are proud to report that these men were also willingly reintegrated into the center.

Anyway, our pastor promptly contacted the government officials about his monthly fees, determining to “settle up” – which is just sort of what you sort of have to do with the Mexican government in situations like this one!

…So the rehab center is back in business.

The only slight problem here is that we really don’t have enough funds for everything that God is doing now. God is blessing our outreach ministry to the youth in amazing ways, and we want to continue the activities that are drawing youth to come to know Christ. God is powerfully restoring lives through the rehab center and we want to continue to minister to men who are eager to seek freedom and healing, even if they and their families have few resources. And of course we want to finish the construction of the new rehab center facility so that we can serve more men and also minister to their families and the community through public worship services.

Still, there is hope.

Today’s story certainly proves it. 

More than anything, it’s a story about 17 men who just simply didn’t do what the Mexican mafia had wanted them to do..

Instead, they held their ground.

…Literally.

More than anything, it’s a story about a rehabilitation movement that has succeeded in changing hearts… 

…And for us, those changed hearts have been worth every penny. .

We would love for you to be a part of our ministry!

If you feel led to join with us in what God is doing:

• We really need one-time donations
  • to finish preparing the new rehab center facility so that we can minister to more men and also offer church services to their families and the community
  • to get the carpentry workshop going so that the rehab center can become more self-supporting and the men coming out of the program can be discipled and learn job skills
• We also need more regular monthly support
  • to provide for the outreach ministry to the youth
  • to enable the rehab center to continue to reach the most needy

Donation info is on our website:

http://LagunaOnFire.org/fundraising

And so much has gone on with us!

…But we’re thankful that, even after everything that has happened, we’re still standing.

Anyway, for us the year has been marked both by some unusual situations in Larry’s health and, of course, by the rise of the covid-19 epidemic.

So get ready. The stories we’ve written here are unlikely stories, and the stars are unlikely stars. Be sure to enjoy them.

Daniel

Our first star is a guy named Daniel, who has been nice enough for over a year now to manage our Mercy Pantry out of his house, since we ourselves live in a different neighborhood from where the actual church is actually located.

Daniel is truly a very interesting person and doesn’t exactly have the credentials you would think of when choosing someone to manage your Mercy Pantry.

In fact, there is sort of something we have to tell you about Daniel… You see he was arrested, for car theft actually — since he was with a group of kids who were in a stolen vehicle. And though Daniel and everybody who knows him all swear that he didn’t have a direct hand in the incident, the long and short of it is that this young man was definitely running with the wrong crowd.

…And when we got to know him a few years ago he had just finished spending about eighteen months in jail.

Ever since then, though, he has been extremely interested in the gospel, and in everything that we were doing, and all we can say is that it didn’t take long for Daniel to become a Christian… and now he and his wife are some of the most committed believers we know.

Anyway, when we handed the Mercy Pantry over to him, Daniel was happy enough to hand out groceries to about 10 families a month, which is what we had been doing before the covid outbreak (and required quarantines!) hit our area of Mexico…

So like we say everything was going fine… Until after the covid outbreak, when Daniel suddenly found that he was giving out groceries to, well um… two hundred families a month. And they were all suddenly knocking at his door!!!

Needless to say this young man became just a little bit more busy after the peak in covid happened… And in fact our phone was ringing off of the hook in the middle of the night with phone calls from him asking about families standing outside on his porch. Meanwhile we were stuck in the states, getting medical treatment for Larry because of a funny tremor in his arm which we will tell you about below !

So we do have to confess that Daniel was a bit overwhelmed at first, and so were we.

But in the end the adversity of the covid situation gave Daniel a chance to prove himself to the entire neighborhood.

Certainly, we have to tell you that he kept every account for stocking the pantry right down to the exact peso.

….And of course there was the time he called us with a break in his voice, asking for the last sack of groceries after he had been searching all day to find a $5 job to feed his own family since he didn’t want to ask for groceries that would be a help to someone else.

So if you’ve ever considered having an ex-convict handing out groceries to two hundred families a month, we would highly recommend it, especially if the person is anything like Daniel.

Some folks, at least, thought he was good enough to do the job…

…And he did it so beautifully.

Jasmine

And of course it would be wrong to send a newsletter this year without telling you the story of how Jasmine fought for the life of her baby… and won.

Many of you know that the birth of this newest little girl was a miracle… but you probably have no idea how much of a miracle…

Anyway we won’t go into much detail, but we will tell some of the story to give you an idea of just how big a thing you prayed for, since the final weeks before her delivery were marked by some difficult situations which left us worried, and wondering about the lives of both Jasmine and the baby.

Ironically the challenges started when Jasmine refused to be talked into giving police bribes.  At eight months pregnant and struggling to sustain her other children in the midst of the covid quarantines, Jasmine had finally figured out a niche in the market and managed to build herself a business selling used clothes cheap to the middle class, who were also being affected by the economy. Unfortunately, though, her success did not last long, since when the police realized that things were going well, they stopped the business, wanting money, of course, to let her continue working.

Determined not to be subject to them, Jasmine made up her mind to obtain something called a “work permit” which turned out to cost $2300 pesos(!?). She had to talk to three different government officials who were familiar with her struggles, each of whom authorized a separate discount for the permit. Then she put in her own last dime, got the paper, and became official!

The day after that, however, she wound up going to the hospital in order to keep the lady she was living with from having her foot amputated — another long story, which we will not go into here…!  Anyway, the point of the moment is that on the way home from taking her friend, Jasmine fell and apparently smashed her tailbone… So doctors were worried about the baby and whether or not it would be able to get into position.

 …They quickly recommended a type of highly specialized back brace.  So at eight months pregnant (and with a messed up tailbone!) Jasmine walked all the following day to talk again to the very same government officials who had helped her the day before, explaining her situation, and to some other government service, and managed to get a discount on the back brace…! We were not sure exactly what had happened but somehow she managed to get the brace and even get her picture taken with a government official…! (We’re lucky it was an election year! )

So the next day (in her new brace!), Jasmine walked all the way across town to pick up an envelope with 20 dollars donated through our pantry so that “Nora,” the lady with the problem foot could make a pot of tamales to sell in order to pay for some of her medicines and continue her treatment… But they couldn’t find the guy at home, so the following day they had to walk across town again!  (Not sure if Nora went a second time!)

Then on the fourth day they made the pot of tamales, sold them, and presumably made enough money to cover the foot medications since as far as we know, this nice lady still has her foot(!).

On the fifth day, though, when Jasmine was on her way back to work to her clothing business, she suddenly began feeling some serious numbness in her face and arms. So, after having talked the doctor down to only the essential medicines, and not without stopping by a neighbor’s house to see if they needed any help washing clothes in exchange for a few pesos, Jasmine stopped by the Mercy Pantry again, asking for a little more help!

Now by this point we didn’t have very much in our Pantry, but we dipped into the bottom of our Mercy funds, and with the equivalent of $15 that her husband Carlos had earned that day cleaning windshields, we got Jasmine the meds.

From there ensued a series of tests in which doctors were wanting to do a different study on her almost every day for 2 weeks, and could not figure out exactly what was wrong with her…!

But after two weeks of testing which seemed like an eternity, and doctors voicing their concerns about some alarming results in her kidney function, Jasmine gave birth to a gorgeous little girl, “Yulaney,” born 2 weeks after her due date!

Anyway, we were just innocent bystanders sort of biting our nails off in all of this, but we know one thing is clear… Neither Jasmine nor the baby would still be here unless God wanted it that way.

And was little Yulaney worth giving everything that we had, and just a little bit more..?

..Yes.

“None other than…”

Ok., So this brings us to our third star.  He’s not as cute as the baby above, but he’s none other than the famous “Mr…” Larry Flathmann …!!!

Now we will have you know here that we wouldn’t normally be featuring Larry as one of the “stars,” in our letter, but it gives us the chance to tell you about his health situation and also lots of things going on in our ministry.

…So our third star’s story begins when we suddenly began noticing some strange, yet unmistakable shaking in his right arm…(?!)

We started seeing chiropractors, and yet as much as we found that they were able to mediate the problem, it just didn’t seem to go away.

So as we mentioned above, Larry was actually in the U.S. being treated by an upper cervical chiropractor when the Texas covid quarantines started closing in on us from all sides. Simultaneously, our Mercy Ministries started exploding in Mexico as all of our people found themselves out of jobs, and in need of medical ministry once the quarantining swept south, since hospitals in the Laguna closed in the effort to prepare themselves for the coming triage. …Anyway it was at that point when we found ourselves in the situation we’ve described above with 190 extra families a month knocking down the door of our Mercy pantry…!

… And speaking of those 190 extra families, somewhere along the way we began to realize that our new and improved, “very popular” Mercy Pantry was going to need, um… funding!

So we knew we needed to come up with a little income for the Pantry fast… and yet we also knew that in the middle of the covid crisis, it was not going to be easy.

The other thing was that we started to see so many other needs arising around us, even in the U.S., that we didn’t want to ask for more than what was absolutely necessary. We tried raising funds, but when that seemed to be going slow, Larry decided to ask his nephew who lived on a farm in small town (“Moravia?!’), Texas if he had any extra construction work, and promptly found himself digging ditches in the sun from dawn to dusk about two days later…!

…Now here we have to confess that initially we were a little concerned about Larry’s arm, and we do have to say that for the first few days Larry felt like he was about to pass out every day when he got home from work!

But do you know what happened…?  …Somehow, Larry’s arm got better.

We don’t know if it was getting up with the sun, or maybe building his muscles in construction, or maybe even the farm food, but something very special about the farm started to work in Larry’s favor. And we can now say that though his tremors haven’t gone away completely, they are almost insignificant a lot of the time now.

To be sure, we have seen a neurologist, and unfortunately there is talk of Parkinson’s every time we see her, but she also says it could just be a tremor, so that’s definitely what we’re hoping for!!!

Anyway, Larry took construction breaks, construction lunches, evenings, Saturdays, and even the time riding back and forth in his nephew’s truck to make phone calls and stay on top of everything that was going on back home in Mexico.

In other news, many of you know that one more shocking thing which happened to us this year is that Larry’s mom contracted covid late this summer and after she’d had a long hard fight with it, we lost her early this fall.

…So it wasn’t always easy working in construction these past months.

No, it wasn’t easy…. When you are on the edge of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and when all you want to do is stand outside a hospital window and try to see your mom through the cracks in her mini blinds, since she is on a ventilator and breathing her last, it isn’t easy working in construction all day to provide extra funding for groceries for 200 families a month.

But it’s what Larry did.

…And it’s what made him a hero, especially to all those families.  And you know something?

It’s probably exactly what his mother would have wanted him to do.

…And she would have been so very, very proud.

And “Grandma Ginny!”

Which brings us to our final star, who just happens to be Larry’s own mother, a.k.a. in some circles as “Grandma Ginny.” We had to feature her here because of the way that she taught us about covid-19, since otherwise we confess that after everything that has happened this year we might have held some resentment towards the disease(!).

At any rate, the first thing we should probably tell you about Grandma Ginny is that she was not the kind of person who would let being a little sick or having aches and pains get her down. And hers is not the story of an already physically weak person! No, in fact the reality is that Grandma Ginny left us all of the sudden… with empty tupperwares sitting on the counter from the last time she had made cookies — and painting projects that she used to do with the kids sitting all around her room.

The other important thing we need to tell you about Grandma Ginny is that she had grandkids.  And we mean grandkids! Seventeen to be exact, and she was already working on 14 great grandkids… with three more on the way!  …And counting.  (Only grandkids are pictured here!)

So of course you can only imagine the shock that went through the family the day Grandma Ginny came down with covid.

At first, everything seemed fine. Grandma did have to go the hospital for a few days, but she was actually released home after her treatment!  The problem came when pneumonia came on, and within a couple days she started having oxygen levels so low that she couldn’t stand up.  So suddenly we found ourselves back to visiting the hospital again. And this time we found ourselves standing outside of an ICU window.

…Now we have to say that here is where things got to be difficult. And we ourselves began to lose faith as we saw that one by one, the beds in that ICU unit were turning up empty all around her.

Even so, Grandma Ginny showed such heart. Unable to sit, she would still make sounds of joy through her breathing machine whenever grandchildren came to stand outside her window and sing hymns to her as someone on the inside held a cell phone to her ear. And of course just like always, the visits from her grandchildren seemed to provoke much more enthusiasm than the visits from the rest of us !

But even the grandkids were not the reason why Grandma Ginny was fighting so hard.

You see, the real reason she was fighting was that her dream had always been to be part of the rapture. In fact, she even had an experience in one of her “conversations with God” which made her think that she was going to live until the rapture, so that she could see Jesus’ coming firsthand!

…So the hard part of this story comes when we got to a point where it became clear that Grandma Ginny wasn’t going to make it to be part of the rapture… At least not as she had hoped.

Still, we don’t know what your spirit, soul, and body theology is, but according to our reading of 1st Thessalonians, if you have already gone to be with the Lord, then you get to go first on the day that we’re taken up!

Anyway, somewhere along the line Grandma Ginny must have figured that out, since when her oldest daughter whispered to her over the phone being held to her ear that it was okay for her to go if she needed to, her sweet heart stopped beating just 45 minutes later.

… And it’s no wonder.

Because the truth of things is that nobody, nobody would have wanted to be first in the rapture more than she would have.

And God was wise once again, since He knew better than any of us that if your heart is yearning to be in the rapture, you might be more comfortable as you wait if you are waiting in Heaven…

So because of Grandma Ginny’s fight, and most of all because of her hopes and dreams, we learned that even in the midst of this seemingly powerful epidemic, life is not about some strange new virus having the victory over people, but that it is still about God, about Him being in control… And it’s still about God bringing people home, and to Himself, in His perfect timing.

Still, though…, Things are not the same without Grandma around.

…But we have memories.  So we will never forget Grandma Ginny talking about how the Lord had told her specifically that at the rapture she was going to be with Him…

And He was right.

She also said she would be in good hands… And she was right.

…And of course we can’t help but smile when we think of her there at the end, forever telling all of the doctors and nurses not to worry…that she was going to be just fine.

 And she is.

Oh, yes.

…And very fine indeed.

Stay tuned for more prayer requests, updates on Larry’s health, and news on plans that we have to start a carpentry workshop in the barrio from all that Larry’s learned construction !!!

We are excited to share that instead of giving away groceries to only around ten families a month, we have recently been giving them to one hundred and fifty families a month…!

…Our area of Mexico will continue to quarantine through May 31st. So we wanted to ask everyone to pray that God would continue to sustain our finances as we put every extra penny we have into our mercy pantry right now !

A couple of you have already given donations, and that has been a huge help since we’re also covering Larry’s medical costs ! If anyone would like to make a donation to our little pantry, just let us know…!

Love to everyone, and most of all thank you for your prayers !

LagunaOnFire.org/donations 

Well, first of all we should say that as we expressed in our newsletter, we really did have a great time in Michigan… ! The kids had never seen snow before, and in fact we had never seen snow before! So you can imagine how entertaining that was to all the people around us!

Now it is important to say here that it’s not really our custom to visit Michigan and the southern beaches of Texas all in a period of weeks… but since Larry’s brother was in from Germany and the family had a gathering near Corpus Christi to see him, we somehow managed to do it, though we would not recommend that any of you try such a thing!

Anyway, we are proud to tell you that, after re-organizing our trunk (snowsuits and scarves “out”, sunglasses, beach shoes, and shorts “in”… !), and driving from Central Mexico to Michigan and then down to the Corpus area with a three-year-old and a six-year-old in the backseat, we are still married!

We have posted a Gallery of pics below… (A lot are from the snow retreat, since everyone at the beach house got a tummy bug and started throwing up dramatically at Larry’s family reunion!)

We have also posted a copy of our Christmas letter (Don’t re-read if you’ve got it !), and a link to our prayer page, since after driving all over the country we didn’t have time to put the prayer requests at the end of our letter !!!

So if you’d like to be up on our prayer requests and haven’t joined the page, feel free to click here for a prayer request each month!

(You can download the pdf version of the newsletter here.)

Well, it’s been another year.  And there is a lot of news to tell, since this year has been interesting to say the least …

In addition to the loss of an eight-year-old girl in one of our church families, we are sad to say that on our last trip to the U.S. (we raise our own funds!), a lot of the youth that we are working with fell into a crystal meth addiction… So, since there is nothing quite like working with at-risk teenagers trying to come off crystal meth, it has definitely been quite a year…!

Anyway, there is so much to tell… but we are going to feature just a few people in order to give you a glimpse of their lives !

Jasmine

You might remember this young woman from quite a few of our newsletters … !  

Many of you know that Jasmine lost her 8-year-old daughter this year, on top of losing her 15-year-old son to a familial abuse situation last year… We have also told you that even as she’s grieving the loss of these two children, she’s still taking care of her five others… including her eighteen-month old baby, and her three-year-old little girl…!

… Anyway, what we haven’t told you is that Jasmine has been living with even more financial strain than usual, since she is fighting to pay off a debt of ten thousand pesos from all of the medical care that “Yurlette” received when she died. The bad thing is that she has no regular job, and so she has no choice but to try to pay things off in exactly the same way she brings money to her family… by doing juggling acts at a local street corner.

The real shock came, though, when Jasmine found out that on top of everything else, she was pregnant again.

… Upon discovering the news, we have to tell you that both Jasmine and her husband were completely devastated, and did not feel they could keep the baby…  By the time we found this young woman, in fact, she was only a step away from doing a home abortion — in part because she had literally been near death during some of her other pregnancies, and in part because she knew she had to carry her 90-pound son on her back every day while juggling to make ends meet.

… So as we talked to Jasmine that day we knew that we had come to the end of our own answers, and to the place where all we could do was beg for the life of the baby — telling her that if God was sending her another child, then He was the one that had to know what He was doing.

… The good thing, though, was that it only took a little begging…  We aren’t sure what happened that day, but within the hour, this young woman had totally softened. She admitted that she did want the baby, and even thought she might give it the middle name of “Yurlette” if it were a girl!!!

Anyway, she did try to keep working at the street corner for a few days, but God loved that baby so much that He actually caused the traffic light to break down there at the intersection. !

So of course now we are in the process of trying to help the family start a tamale business…!  Anyway, please do continue to pray for Jasmine and those around her!

Marlene

… We wanted to feature a few other people, among them Jasmine’s daughter, whom you may also remember from when she was a little girl.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Marlene has grown up and taken some hard turns since both her brother and sister died so suddenly.

In fact, so many things happened so quickly in Marlene’s life that by the time Kim managed to catch up with her at age fifteen, Marlene had already had three husbands, two miscarriages, tried drugs, and suffered from two separate overdoses on marijuana and crystal meth.

To be sure, this young girl’s weight had gone down to eighty pounds because of her addictions… She was also suffering from heart problems due to the crystal meth. So of course Kim was shaking in her boots when she began to try to face the idea of working with the new teenage Marlene.

Anyway, Kim did make a mistake when she said, “Oh my gosh, she looks terrible…!” upon realizing how underweight Marlene had become. That afternoon, though, the Lord convicted Kim, and told her to call back and say that she thought Marlene was beautiful… So she called and did exactly that!  … And the very next day this young girl came to church and asked for prayer.

…That was the start of a very interesting relationship between Kim and Marlene, which has definitely had some ups and downs!  We won’t give a lot of details, but we are happy to say that Marlene is off of crystal meth, and is now rapidly gaining weight!   … So please keep praying!

Cesar

Here’s another story for you … This is a good one about our friend, Cesar… Now Cesar doesn’t have anything to do with Jasmine’s family, but his story is so good that he’s certainly won himself a spot !

Anyway, this young man started out a few years ago as one of the terrors our kids program… He tried drugs around age 12, and by the time he was fifteen he found his addictions rapidly closing in on him…

…Until one day he decided to change. To everyone’s surprise Cesar showed up sober to one of our outreach activities and motioned Kim over, asking for prayer.  Hearing the seriousness in his voice, Kim turned, promising to bring Larry as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, though, the crowd pressed in that night so we couldn’t get back to Cesar for a while, and when we returned to pray for him, he was gone.

That was probably actually a good thing, as it turned out… Since two days later and having just turned seventeen, Cesar walked in the rain for fifteen miles, against the advice of everyone in his family, and with only the clothes on his back in order to check himself into a Christian drug rehab center.

Now it is important to say that the center that Cesar checked himself into was actually a voluntary one… meaning that he could leave at any time he wanted and go back to his addictions.

…But Cesar didn’t do that, in fact… Instead he chose to stay there for almost 2 years … Anyway, suddenly two years later we ran into Cesar in the neighborhood…!  He was back !

Now we will say that it took some adjusting for Cesar to find himself again…  So after pulling him off of a few park benches on some particularly long nights, we decided to invite him to live for the Lord outside of the rehab center.

…Things finally began to click, and to make a long story short Cesar is now working, drug-free, and contributing to his family… So pray that God would use him to reach others like him!

Victor Manuel

…Last but not least we wanted to feature an older gentleman by the name of Victor Manuel…

You may or may not remember Victor since he appeared as a side character in our last letter, but he’s the grandfather to blame for the accidental death of Jasmine’s son, due to some sort of abuse situation during which in a drunken moment, he could not stay his hand.

Wrecked from his own childhood, Victor has not had any legal action taken against him because the case remains unproven, since the extended family actually framed the young man for suicide in order to avoid problems.

Anyway, we could raise a whole lot of legal questions here, but what we really want to share with you is that after the incident, Victor started coming to church… In fact, he is there often before the service, kneeling in front of the altar and quietly asking for forgiveness from God.

… And though we won’t say there haven’t been a few bumps along the road as we’ve ministered to him, Victor is coming along.  Certainly the best thing of all is that Victor is considering checking himself into a rehab center… But until he does, we know that God is working as he sits quietly in church, usually only a few chairs away from Jasmine, who overcomes all of her own resentment just to be there.

*******

… So to summarize… thank you for praying.

And in closing, we know we don’t have to tell you that ministry in the barrio isn’t always easy.

But where else can you find a service where an accidental murderer and the mother of the victim sit for two hours in the same room… or where two divorced people sit side-by-side, and where crystal meth addicts crowd around the door, trying hard not to show that what’s being said inside is by far the most important thing in their lives…?

Anyway, to make a long story short we are having to learn as we go, to let ourselves feel, to hurt for these families, and most of all to risk loving them … which can be painful at times.

And we know there is no real formula or easy way to do it.

But thankfully, there is One who makes a way. And it’s a good thing…

    …Because there are so many out there… searching to find their way.

Merry Christmas everybody… !

We are so glad to finally be able to update you on everything that has been going on!

A lot has been happening, and as many of you know, it has been a particularly hard season for us after the loss of one of our youth…  To be honest, our hearts are still aching after the death of fifteen-year-old “Angel,” who was both a member of the youth group we work with and the son of a family that has long been part of our church.

… There is more on that situation here, but we have had so many other prayer needs come up that we wanted to share them all with you, since we know and continue to learn that prayer is the most important thing.

So thank you…   And here goes.

FELIPE…

We first met Felipe as he was trying to steal a broom from our neighbor.  As it turned out, he wound up taking our broom… which was rather unsettling as we watched him slink away with it!   

Anyway, it was against our better judgement, but when he came back looking for work the next morning, we let Felipe wash the van!   When we noticed that he wasn’t actually doing it very well, Kim (who is a real neat freak!) got a rag and began to show him how to clean it according to specs!   

Once he gained an understanding of how to do a detailed job on something, Felipe got a few more clients in our neighborhood as people became interested in having him do work around their houses.  Since then, he has become one of our most faithful employees and gained an increasing interest in the gospel.

Recently, Felipe has fallen ill with a disease which has caused him to be in and out of the hospital…  And as if that weren’t enough, his tiny little paper house actually burned to the ground, together with all of his belongings, in an accident which happened in his neighborhood.

…We decided to help Felipe, so we got a new house started for him by building a main room and helping to roof it… (Actually, “we” didn’t build very much! …But there were some construction guys who did a great job… !  )  

Anyway, please pray for Felipe, since God is really knocking on his door in lots of ways.  He has started to attend Bible studies through a church in his own neighborhood, but do keep praying as we try to bless him while he does his chores around our house…!

MARIA SOLEDAD,  a.k.a. “Chole”

Here is an example of one situation where your prayers have really made a difference!  Maria is actually our pastor’s wife, whom many of you know was on death’s door a few months ago.

Maria was rushed to the hospital one morning after a strange fainting spell she’d had.  When doctors discovered that her kidneys had flatlined, she waited in a coma for two days before having surgery to receive dialysis.  But even after she surprised everyone by living through the surgery, doctors were very pessimistic about what they could do…

… One night one of our youth from the gang felt led to pray for her, so we took a trip up to the hospital.  At that point, Maria was still unconscious, and her body was only partially responding to the dialysis.  After her doctor had finished warning us that she was still very much on the point of death unless things improved quickly, he left the room.

In the silence which hung in the wake of his words, we prayed.  

About a minute afterwards, a mysteriously nice nurse came in…!  Glancing at the young man standing over the patient’s bed, she quickly enlisted him to help her turn Maria.  Strangely, right after he did so, her body expelled all of the fluid that was missing from her dialysis earlier that day !

…The following morning, Maria woke up and the dialysis started working like clockwork.  … So praise God.

… And of course as to what had happened the night before, we can’t rightly say, but we highly recommend that if any of you are having trouble with your hospital patients, you should really try using gang members to help you with some of the spiritual and practical aspects of your patient care  !

CARLOS

Anyway, so now we cannot help but highlight our friend Carlos…  Of course it’s impossible to write about all of our youth, but he in particular has a story that we couldn’t resist telling you! 

…Carlos has been converted to the Lord for a while now, and has managed to hang onto his faith even in the midst of the forces of the barrio which try to bring him down.

The only bump we encountered along the road as we continued to minister to Carlos was that he had just a few  too many girlfriends…!  In particular, there was one very pretty girl who was the envy of the neighborhood, and would not leave his bedroom!  

So, after some very “spirited” discussions with Carlos, we decided he needed a sleeping bag…  And since sleeping bags can be expensive, we began praying for one!  Anyway, we are not used to having our prayers answered so soon… but a few days later, a guy knocked on the door of our church…  And he was selling, yes, you guessed it, a ratty old sleeping bag which was a steal for ten dollars…!

So after a few more spirited discussions with Carlos, he dutifully climbed up on the roof, with his sleeping bag… and his dog… and continued sleeping there for the next few nights until the pretty blonde girl moved out… !

And after a few strange looks from his friends, Carlos has rapidly become a powerful witness to young people in our neighborhood! He has already been used by God in helping us to expand our youth ministry and to reach families in general… !

JASMINE: More on Angel’s death…

Many of you may remember Jasmine from our former newsletters…  What you may not know is that she was actually the mother of Angel, the young man who died.

Sadly, the loss of Angel was just another tragedy for Jasmine in a life marked by pain.  In fact ever since we have known her,  Jasmine has told us stories of suffering, including how she lost both of her parents very young, and found herself married to an abusive husband, with whom she began to have the first of her seven children. 

Since Angel’s death, Jasmine has been trying to somehow move forward for the sake of her family…  Many of you also know that one of her daughters has spina bifida and needs lots of attention, in addition to her two-year-old, and youngest son, who is only nine months old.  

Needless to say, the loss of Angel was also a huge blow for Jasmine, especially since there was there was some amount of mystery surrounding whether or not his death was a suicide, or just a severe episode of abuse that occurred when Angel was with his extended family.

We will have more specific ideas on how to pray for Jasmine in our link below, but in general please pray that God’s grace would truly be upon her…  And that we ourselves would have the grace to minister in the midst of so much tragedy that we don’t understand…

… And perhaps we never will.

Even so, we know that God is good… though at times we just have to trust Him…

…But we are going to miss you, Angel.  So thank you for the years that you gave us.

Most of all, thanks for teaching us that we don’t always have to understand… just everything. 

   …We know the One who does.

For More Specific Prayer Requests…

about Jasmine, her family, and even us, please see this link: Prayer Requests

• For Jasmine…: Please pray that God would somehow heal her heart and all of the heaviness in it, and that she would have wisdom in knowing how to raise her other six children…  She is a believer and has shown interest in being discipled, however she has been struggling lately since she seems to have hit a new wave of depression.  Pray that life would not just be a series of going through the motions for her, but that she would truly open herself up to finding wholeness in the Lord.

• Marlene:  Many of you may also remember Marlene as one of Jasmine’s daughters, and Angel’s sister… We have included her here because unfortunately she has really fallen off a cliff after Angel’s death.  For a while she was even trying hard drugs and disappearing at night, though nobody knew where she went…  Recently however, she has been a little more stable, although it has been at the expense of Jasmine encouraging her to go ahead and marry, at only fourteen years of age.  Sso please pray that God would change the course of Marlene’s life entirely, and that He would protect her from any decisions that are not right for her.
• Victor Manuel:  Victor is Angel’s grandfather, and is actually the person deemed by most people as responsible for Angel’s death… With a history of abusing his family, Victor denies having had anything to do with the incident, though he was the only one present, and as we say a lot of sources suspect that Angel’s death was some sort of severe abuse incident rather than suicide.
       … Anyway, the important thing here is that Victor has come to church on several occasions, crying and begging for God’s forgiveness.  So please pray specifically for him… Pray that we and others would have the grace to minister to him, and that he would experience the depth of God’s love and grace.  Pray that he would come clean if he needs to, and most of all that any and all chains of addiction and abuse would be stopped in his life.  Forever.

• Larry and Kim…
• Who us…? Well, we do want to praise God, since all things considered we are doing all right…
• We’d like you to keep praying, though, since we are emotionally worn out from all that has happened, and since the level of “attack” on our ministry still continues to be pretty striking… (To be sure, the last time we returned home from a trip we drove up to our house with water pouring off of our roof from a broken pump, and a power outage which affected our whole street (Hey! …We paid our bill…!), not to mention phone calls from some of our youth who got stranded in Guadalajara. (They had apparently gone on a construction project which turned out to be headed up by drug lords who left them there… So do pray for protection!)
• Anyway, please pray that all of the ‘fun’ of any kind of “unnecessary” adventures would stop, or alternatively that they would only make us stronger and more ready for ministry! Pray also for Karina and Jonathan, that their childhood experiences would not be compromised, but instead enriched by our missionary lifestyle.
• Pray for financial protection for us, that God would bless all of our supporters, and that funding would not be an issue for us in the midst of so many other things! (Has anyone ever noticed that young people cannot be in the same room together for any period of time without eating…?)
• Please do praise God with us, though, because even in spite of everything that has happened lately, the youth are responding to us in new ways and in greater numbers, and the outreach service which has sprung out of Angel’s death has had the church filled with people listening to the gospel! 

Hi everyone,

Well we’re back… and finally able to send out some very late Christmas cards!

If you can believe it, we have actually spent the past several months trying to write an update, but things have been moving so fast in the Laguna that we have hardly been able to keep up with it ourselves!

To be sure, we had quite an eventful trip last summer and do have trauma about coming back to the States!  But since we have to renew our van permit every six months for Mexico and Larry’s brother is in from Germany, we are here for a bit.

Anyway, though, as many of you know, our last trip was full of many of the usual and a lot of unusual adventures which can happen on trips.   And of course it was also interesting to get back to our “barrio” and pick up the thread of what we had been doing…  But the good thing was that God showed Himself to be amazingly faithful as we continued to work with our group of junior high and high school aged kids who struggle with addictions.

…One of the key things which He revealed to us during these past months is that real physical hunger is actually an important factor in teenagers becoming addicted to drugs at certain stages in their lives, at least in the area of the Laguna.  Of course you know that we always used to joke about how much this “band of youth” could eat, but what we didn’t realize was that they really weren’t getting enough to eat…  However through various conversations, we began to realize that with the economic downturns in Mexico, many of the kids we work with don’t have the confidence to raid the refrigerator the way they would otherwise do at this age, since they tend to be part of big families which are struggling financially and where the focus is to make sure their younger brothers and sisters go to the table first.

As we thought about it, we also realized that most all of the kids we knew worked in lower-end jobs earning pocket change to support their families.  We knew that by the time they gave something to their parents, they did not have much left, and that a bottle of glue was actually a lot cheaper than any kind of snack that would put a dent in their hunger…  We were even more disconcerted to find out that one of the real reasons kids become addicted to glue is that it can actually create nausea in them which will kill the hunger through the night — especially if they go to sleep with it.

This revelation was painful and slow in coming, but in fact the nausea concept really did hit home in a moment when Kim accidentally wound up getting a little whiff of glue herself!  Anyway, in an experiment we began offering to buy some of the younger kids snacks in exchange for their drugs… In no time, we had everyone following Larry around like the pied piper telling him about all of the different junk food they were craving from the neighborhood convenience store!    More importantly we found that we had grace to be able to actually walk around the neighborhood and take drugs out of kids’ hands — a thing which is not normally easy to do… and we began to see that it was not rocket science to at least begin to break the cycle of addiction in their lives.

Now of course there are complexities to this, and we know we are on a time clock as the kids begin to move on to more addictive substances, and as their bodies begin to crave the actual substances rather than food.  Even in the space of time it took to fix our van after the “flood” (don’t ask!), we had to work a lot harder in order to take drugs away from these younger kids…  And we ourselves have had our share of distractions this year as our very active one-and-a-half-year-old has had to have his tummy “seasoned?” against just about every bug in Mexico.

So, we can report as usual that the past few months have been a really wild ride…  Even so, we have had very few real “no’s” from our youth as we try to put food into their hands instead of drugs.

And of course our prayer is that as we begin to stay their physical hunger, God would develop a very real spiritual hunger in them…

We know that these youth are not always easy to reach, but we were truly inspired by a vision a friend once had for us that our ministry was like the woman who sweeps her whole house to find that one last coin…

… So in closing we are happy to tell you that we have managed to uncover a few more very valuable coins… all precious to God and well worth the effort it took to find them!

… Anyway, we wanted you to meet them.

But are they really worth the search…?

… Well, you be the judge.

Some valuable “coins” we’ve found…

And more yet to be found…

And we will keep searching…       Luke 15:8