Oh really?

It has been a while since I wrote you all on here! I hope everyone is okay! We do miss you all very much! I really don't have a certain thing that I want to write about. I think I will just kind of write about what ever comes to my mind.

I do want to remind you that tonight (afternoon for you) will be the "Question and Answer" night. I am really excited about it. Joey is too! He is actually doing more research now for it. There are 18 questions all having to with various subjects. I will give you some examples here: "Why do the Catholics not believe in Birth Control? Where in the Bible does it say we can't use it?" "Why is there so little worship during communion at NLBC." "Is it Biblical for women to be ministers and lead a church?" one more, "Can you be a Christian and not believe in the trinity?" So these are a few of the questions. So I think tonight will be a very good night!! But I would ask that you pray because some of these questions are very important and I know that Joey is probably a little nervous. 

I also would like to talk about the Holiday Club. For some reason I am very nervous about it. I am not as prepared as I would like to be. I really hope that at least one child leaves knowing more about Jesus than when they first came! We have absolutely no clue as to how many children are coming. We will just work with what we get.  If there are no children at least all the adults will have fun! haha Oh this is good...Last Sunday Mike, who announces church news, said that we only had 2 volunteers signed up for the Holiday Club and he told everyone we would like more. So when we looked at the sign up sheet after church there were at least 10 names on it!!! That was such a blessing to us because we only needed about 5 or 6 people. We were very pleased with that!

I thought you might be interested in knowing some things that we have noticed living here in England that may be different from living in Alabama. Some things are the words/phrases they use.
1. taking the mic out of someone means making fun of them. (I like this one)
2. car park is a parking lot
3. a queue is a line of people (you would say it like "Q")
4. Pudding is just dessert in general.
5. "what did you have for tea?" is like "what did you have for supper?" so tea is another name for supper and they also use it for the drink too.
6. a bloke is a man
7. an advert is a commercial
Those are just a few we have noticed and we are trying to use them! haha We have noticed some other things as well. Joey and I went to the city center yesterday to meet up with Erika so that we could have tea with her and her husband Peter. When we were waiting to meet her we were just watching. I noticed a few things a little different that I haven't really seen in Alabama. One was how many different cultures we saw! I mean it was unreal! I was pretty amazed. Then I noticed something not so good. That is that there are a lot of younger girls smoking. I have talked to David about that before and he said that most men here are attracted to women who are very thin. So to keep the weight off young girls smoke. I mean I know that people at home smoke but it is just seems different here. We have also noticed another thing. When you are a Christian back home and you are looking for a mate. Generally you would look for another Christian. Well here that is definitely not the case. Christians are so few here so what Christians look for are people with morals. We asked David about this and he said that there are usually more Christian women than men. So it would not be fair to say to the women that unless they can find a Christian man then they cannot get married, because if you said that then most of them would never get married. And it is not fair to them. I found that very sad! What happens then after you marry a non-Christian? Do they quit going to church to make their mate happy? Will they skip over 2 Corinthians 6:14-15? This is hard, right? We are also learning that people here (a lot like people at home, including me and Joey) think that..."well we know that Bible says this...but times have changed and that just isn't our culture today." So do we look at the Bible and say well this is good, but this part wouldn't really work for today?  We have all been taught things that is said to be in the Bible but isn't actually there. So now we are having to look and search the Bible for what is truth. One thing we hear is "if women cant be pastors, why cant they wear hats?" Which seems like a good question until you actually read that verse. Paul says to "Make up your own minds". But it makes you think about what we do at home. What do we do that's cultural but not necessarily scriptural? Of course to us, there is a line we see here, that we separates us from some. Some say a lot of issues in the bible is "cultural" where we personally draw the line and say "Its doctrine". We like the words Brother Jason use for this : "The sufficiency of Scripture" The question is do we really trust Scripture for all it is worth? So you can pray for us that we would learn more and more each day. We know that thing like this are the same at home but being away from our comforts seem to point these things out. I think we will learn more by being away from what is familiar. 


Please pray for us and the Holiday Club!
We love and miss y'all!
We will write again soon!