Matté and 16 Children...

We arrived in Rosario, Argentina tonight after being in a place called San Miguel for the conference. The church is actually in a place called Gran Bourg attached to the property where the Pastor and his many children live. Pastor Lemos has 16 children (between the ages of 7 and 33, and many grandchildren, I lost count). There are ten girls and six boys and they are an amazing family. I didn´t meet ALL of them because they were not all at the conference center but I met many of them and they are a really precious family. None of them speak English, haha, that was interesting. Naturally, it would really make no sense for me to be on this trip because VERY few people speak English and with the exception of two messages that Pastor Jon Stambo spoke in English it was all Spanish. I actually can understand a good portion of the messages in Spanish when Pastor Stan and Pastor Jon are speaking but when its a native Spanish speaker, forget about it! haha. I said all that to say, the time with this family and the presence of God in our meetings was amazing. IT IS GOD that works in our lives to will and to do of His good pleasure (Phil 2:12-13) and we are not limited to just the natural life but we have a supernatural life given to us by God. The two messages in English were those two, really amazing. The conference theme was from Jerimaiah 29:11 called LIVING IN THE THOUGHTS OF GOD. The theme was thinking with God´s thoughts. Really good times!
Friday night when we got to the conference center the three of us were hungry so we went to this hamburger place and ordered the one with ¨the works¨ on it. It was this massive bun with a REALLY GOOD burger, egg, ham, cheese and lettuce on it. I have never actually had HAM on a HAMburger but it was very yummy! Argentina is known for its meat so we have been eating as much of that as possible because Lima pretty much has chicken... and more chicken, haha. The next day the three of us went out to the little town in the afternoon and got this REALLY good ice cream! So good that we got it again the next day after going soulwinning in the plaza. One really interesting twist on the Spanish part of this trip is that Argetine Spanish is different than in Lima. Not sure how I can explain this on here but I will try to briefly... Basically one thing is the word for I is YO and in Argentina is sounds like SHO but with a J sounds... haha. I wonder if anyone will be able to understand what I´m talking about. they do that with anything else that sounds like a Y sound so you can imagine that would throw me off even more! Last night a group of us stayed up pretty late just telling jokes and laughing and drinking matté. Matté is this tea that they drink here but its not just any tea... you have a special matté cup and this special spoon that actually isn´t a spoon, its more like a metal straw but with only small holes at the bottom which is shaped like a spoon... if that makes any sense, ha. Anyway, they are very particular about this drink, you fill the cup with the loose herbs and sugar if you want and the ¨spoon¨ goes in the bottom of the cup. You pour water to fill it and one person drinks all that. Then you pass it back to the person and they put more water and maybe more sugar in and then they just keep passing the cup around like that. They drink it all the time and I actually tried some last night that I liked. I dont know if that makes any sense to anyone reading this but if not, oh well. It was a great time, lots of laughs. Funny story, Pastor Stan thought it would be really funny to do this, he whispered someting to Pastor Lemos at dinner and to get everyone´s attention he just claps twice and they get quiet so he did that and all of a sudden everyone lifts up their glasses to give a toast and they say my name then CORBATTA!!! I had no idea what they were saying, haha, then they told me that it means TIE (the thing men wear around their necks, haha) SO random but for the rest of the time they all called me Corbatta. It was pretty funny, might have been one of those you had to be there moments... Today we got some nice beef and coffee after walking around Buenos Aires (which is really beautiful) and then took a 3 - 4 hour bus ride here. Now I should get to bed! I can hear people snoring somewhere and I´m in the hotel lobby... ha! I will write more at the end of the trip! Chao!