Small Groups Starting this Week!

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!