To Save a Life

The Week of August 8, we had our 4 Annual Spanish (language) Week of Camp.  God helped us out, as always and it was a much bigger success than what we could have imagined.  This is my fourth year coordinating this week of camp.  The idea is to encourage the Spanish speaking youth of the churches in Florida.  For many years the camp had no participation from the Spanish speaking congregations.  Now, this is changing.  Not only is our week of camp growing, but some of the young people are falling in love with camp and have even ventured into other weeks as well.  Also, the unity among the Spanish churches is growing as a result of this week of camp.  The young people come back really excited and want to continue doing activities with the young people from other congregations. 

This year we ended up having 47 campers and 23 staff members from spanish congregations from Central Florida all the way to Homestead.  We grew from last year by five campers.  But, what is really cool is that the majority of the children that participated this year were first timers.  And, they all loved it and had a great time.  Our theme was based on the movie "To Save a Life"  Of course we called it "Salvavidas."  The young people were challenged to look for opportunities in their daily life to save a soul for Christ.  The greatest news of all is that at the end of the week we had two baptisms.  I am proud that our daughter Brianna Estrada obeyed the Gospel and was baptised.  What a great feeling it is to baptise your daughter.  I will never forget that moment.  We are also very proud of Marcello Santamaria that decided to make Jesus his Lord and Savior through baptism.  Please pray for these young people as they begin their spiritual journey.  Thank you for all of your prayers and love.

Spiritual Growth Workshop

As many of you know we had the Spiritual Growth Workshop the last weekend of July.  I was asked to speak on the Spanish program.  I thought a class on "The Lord Reigns In My Heart."  I spoke infront of an all male audience, which afforded me the opportunity to hit on some "manly" topics.  For the spanish language program, this was the greatest year ever.  The greatest both in substance and turnout.  We had Christians join us from as far as Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, and south to the end of Florida. The weekend was also very special because we had a special tribute for our dear brother Armando Alaniz.  Brother Alaniz, passed away a couple of months ago.  Armando was instrumental in helping us establish the eldership at Hialeah, he was also a professor at Atlantic International Bible Institute in Miami until he and his family moved back to Houston.  This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Armando, he was a teacher at Sunset school of preaching, a counselor, missionary, mentor and father.  Armando was honored at the workshop through a slide show presentation and several leaders had their turns honoring him with a few words.  Armando will be greatly missed, we pray for his wife Jainey, his children Armando Jr, Gloria, and Angelica, as well as the rest of his family.  We can't wait to see Armando in Heaven some day.   

Something else that was great was Rex Morgan gave all of the preachers that were present a complete copy of our program Con La Biblia Abierta.  They were all very happy as this will be a great tool to help them preach the Gospel.  We can't wait for the next workshop.  This year we had approximately 400 christians join us.  Maybe in two years we can double this!!  We can acoomplish all things through Christ.