We
wanted to start our small groups 3 weeks ago and were planning to do so, but my
wife was told that she needed a root canal and the same day she came down with
a bacterial infection that turned out to be the worst illness that she has had
since a bad bout of pneumonia about 30 years ago. Getting a root canal meant driving
to Mexico because it would save us over $2,000. (Last year I got two root
canals and two crowns for a total of $1,000 and in Oregon it would have cost me
$6,000.)
We
immediately decided that it was better to go before we started our small groups
rather than to start and then have to interrupt them just to go to the dentist.
Unfortunately, Jerilyn’s illness meant antibiotics and a period of healing
before such dental work could be done. Thus, the three week delay. Alas, after
working on Jerilyn’s root canal for over 3 hours in two days, the dentist
decided that the roots of that tooth were too far gone to save and that extraction
was the only option. It took a different dentist over an hour to get the
remaining pieces of tooth out of her mouth. My poor wife suffered quite a bit
through all of that. In the end, the suffering would have been no different in
the US and the whole thing actually saved us over $3,000. Three hours of root
canal and one hour of tooth extraction cost us a total of $250.
Enough
of dentist talk! We are starting our small groups this week and we need you to
pray for us. We will be having our first Jefferson small group meeting on
Monday night at 7pm and our first Salem small group meeting on Friday night at
the same time.
Each
time we get together in our small group we will be spending some time in
fellowship, some time in Bible study, and some time in accountability. Our
Bible study will start out by digging a little deeper into what we are studying
in church on the weekends. We just began to study 1 Corinthians. We have asked
each person in the small group to meditate on the scripture that we just
studied and come prepared to share how else God is speaking to them through the
passage. We will also be sharing other scriptures that God has used to speak to
us this past week.
During
the accountability time for the first several weeks we will take turns sharing
our “life maps” – our testimonies of how God has worked throughout our lives to
bring us to where we are in our lives today. This testimony will last 20-25
minutes followed by a question and answer time followed by prayer for the individual
sharing his life map. This week, I will be sharing; next week Jerilyn will be
sharing, the following two weeks our lay leaders in each church will be
sharing- Luis and Jessie Zavala in Salem, and Juan and Remedios Alvarez in
Jefferson.
Please
pray for us that we will have meaningful fellowship, interesting Spirit led
discussions in Bible study, and a deeper understanding of each other and how we
can pray for each other during the testimony times over the next few weeks.
Thank
you for praying!
