Monterrey Missions

Medical Brigade 2010

2010-09-04T16:18:00.000-05:00

“Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have,

for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” Hebrews 13:16

We thank the Lord for the Medical Brigade that took place the last days of July! There was a lot of previous work in order to have everything ready. We thank the Lord for the new believers in our mission, since they were a great help and served God with a glad heart. Once the first part of the group from Monterrey arrived, we still had work to do. Then two days later, the first patients started to come. We had patients from several villages. Dental work began with General Medicine on a Wednesday and all the other specialists arrived on a Saturday. It was a blessing to share God’s Word too with both adults, and children. We know you prayed for this event and we thank you for that. God worked mightily through His people. To God be the glory!

Below is a link to where you can see all the pictures from the Medical Brigade which I will be trying to add more pictures and information about each one of them. The video below is also a quick review of the medical brigade.

PICTURES
http://www.flickr.com/photos/josue2415/sets/72157624747938395/

VIDEO

Our house

2010-05-18T12:45:00.000-05:00

We have been praying for the past year and a half for a piece of land of our own so that we would be able to build our own house. Right now we have been living in what is supposed to be the kitchen area of the church. It is approximately a 10x10 ft. square and inside that area we have our 5x5 ft. bedroom. To tell the truth, it has been hard to live in such a small space with two kids, but we are very thankful to the LORD that we have always had a roof over our heads and bed to sleep on every night. Well after a year and a half of prayers, I am overjoyed to inform you all that yesterday (May 17th) we signed the papers and will be receiving the deed to our land tomorrow (May19th). God willing, we will be starting the construction of our house next week. It will be a blessing to have our bedroom separate from the kids’, our bathroom inside the house and not having to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night. We praise the Lord for what He has supplied so far for this and pray we’ll be able to leave the church and live in our house in time for the Medical Brigade that will be the last of July of this year. Please keep us in your prayers that God will guide us and keep supplying the money necessary for this project that we will be starting.

Our Shield is God

2010-05-18T12:44:00.000-05:00

“Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word.” Psalm 119:114

Back in April, as a family and church, we thanked the Lord for His wonderful sacrifice on the cross for our sins and for the victory we have through His resurrection. His blood covers our lives and God is always encamping around us, we know that for sure. One night, Jessy and the babies were in the living room when we heard our window break. It was a bit scary because I knew it had been because of a gunshot. I first ran to check on my family and they were fine. In the commotion as we wondered who had done it and why, I opened the door and in the distance I saw a truck of rabbit hunters. Josué kept saying: “But they’re good people, they didn’t want to shoot us!” We all thanked the Lord for being our shield of protection. It had been an accident but I talked to the mayor anyways so hunters won’t hunt near our home anymore. That night, the Bible story we read with the boys ended saying: “I will trust God even when I’m afraid”. It’s amazing how God had prepared that Bible story for that exact night.

The outcome of the church events

2010-02-22T10:01:00.001-06:00

Saturday we had our youth event. I really wish I could say we had a full church, but God’s plans are bigger than our plans. The day before the event, we found out that there was going to be a 15th birthday party (It’s kind of like sweet 16 in the States) but here they go all out and if they don’t invite you, it’s normal for you to show up anyway. So the whole village shows up or at least the youth do. It started at 3:00 in the afternoon. So despite the discouragement of some of the believers, we decided not to worry but leave it all in God’s hands. We were an hour behind our schedule, when 5 young girls arrived. Since it was just ladies, I just welcomed them and prayed to begin the program and left it all to Jessy and Dr. Lupita. The girls were very attentive and God’s Word was planted in their hearts. Now we pray that God will protect these girls from evil and that they will commit their lives to the Lord.

On Sunday we had an evangelistic monologue and special songs that our Sister Adele Johanes wrote. We thank God because some of the believers brought guests with them. A lady received Jesus as her Savior and the other guests were very interested and said we can visit them to share more with them from the Bible and they also said they will keep on coming to the church to hear more. We thank the Lord for the opportunities He gives us to share His Word.

The Crazy Case of the lost Pacifier

2010-02-21T22:13:00.000-06:00

Friday was finally a sunny day after several cold and rainy days. We took advantage of that and left about 12:00p.m. to go from house to house handing out invitations for the event we planned to have with the youth about sex and God’s plan for marriage. We got back home around 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon so that Jessy could give her English class, only to find out that our electricity wasn’t working. We’re not sure what was wrong, we had electricity, but the voltage was so low that even the lights wouldn’t come on. We thought it was something that would be fixed quickly but as the sun set in the horizon we were still without light. So I got out our Colman Lantern and lit it. We decided that to go to bed early, so we changed the kids into their pajamas and thought we were ready for bed only to realize that we were missing Benjamin’s pacifier and that started a search that went on and on. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but since he is still a little sick he has a hard time sleeping without it. By 12:00a.m. we were going crazy and by 1:00 we were definitely going crazy. Josué said: “You need to put your shoes on and look outside”. It was then that we finally began to think and remembered that we had saved one of Josué’s pacifiers in his baby box. Finally we got in bed at 1:30 a.m. Then Saturday morning when we went outside, we found out that our dog had got the pacifier sometime when Benjamin had gone to the door to look outside. For some reason our dog likes to eat pacifiers!!!! Later that day, we went to the small store in the village and bought a couple of them.

Preaching on Ephesians 6:10-20

2010-02-14T21:15:00.003-06:00

My oldest son (Josué) was a big help and sent from God. He was supposed to be in Sunday school. I had planed on just using Josué's armor as an example but right as I was going to start talking about the first piece of the armor. Josué just showed up and was asking for the armor so I put the first piece on him and he stayed for the whole sermon letting me explain each piece and putting them on him. I hope you like the picture, my friend Giancarlo took it.

2010-02-08T20:26:00.003-06:00

Sorry about the fact that I have not updated the blog I got really busy after that last posts and then I even came to forget that I had the Blog until just recently someone asked me about it
I am planing on trying to up date the blog at least once a week

VBS in the village

2009-08-07T22:38:00.002-05:00

We had VBS the last week of July. We started getting ready since the beginning of June. Our youth group helped us paint the background and make the props. We did the Son Harvest Country Farm and it was fun getting ready. We also had material from both Living Faith and Midway Church and that was a great help. The teachers Jessy had trained, helped us during VBS and some of our youth too. We had a total of 92 kids and an average of 70. We always started with an opening session where we had the skits and songs and then divided in 4 sections: Crafts, Bible Class, Games, and Snacks. Every day we went to get one of the ladies from our church and 12 children who live 5 minutes away from the church so they wouldn’t miss VBS. They were all excited to come and learn about God. For our snacks the ladies from the church took turns to bring different stuff and the church had some stuff too. During these days we had some of the children’s mothers visiting and again on the last day. For our last day we had a small “fair”. We gave each kid a ticket that allowed them to get: popcorn, a hotdog, lemonade, corn on the cob, go on a horse ride, and play several games. The horse belongs to Juan, a young man from our youth…Josué really enjoyed riding it. On our last day, Jessy had a station where several kids who weren’t saved went to hear the Wordless Book story and they accepted the Lord as Savior. We also had a watermelon contest, that was so much fun, kids had to eat the slice with their hands behind their back…they did it more for the fun and the watermelon than for the prize. We thank the Lord for the opportunity to work with all these children. Please keep us in your prayers, we want to continue the work with them…the future church.

In Loving Memory

2009-08-07T22:34:00.001-05:00

First of all I want to thank all of you for your prayers and the e-mails I received after I informed you about Nanny parting to be with the Lord. I also want to say I’m very thankful for the spiritual heritage and Godly example I received from Nanny. She always encouraged me to keep growing in the work of the Lord and never give up in serving Him. She was always supporting and loving us. Although her death was unexpected, she was ready for it, she had already asked the Lord to take her in His time…and He did. She peacefully closed her eyes and united with her Savior. It surely is hard to know when we go back to Arkansas for a visit…she won’t be there…but we have very many precious memories in our hearts to remember her by. The happiest thing is to know she’s in Heaven with our loving Savior.

Newsletter January 2009

2009-02-02T20:06:00.007-06:00

Dear Faithful Supporters:

We pray you´re all doing great as we´ve started this year 2009. We want to give special thanks to all of you for your prayers concerning Jessy´s health and the baby. Jessy´s blood pressure and sugar have been under control and she has been able to be out of bed to do the stuff she needed to. Two weeks ago the doctor was a little concerned about our baby´s growth and because of that we had to go back to Monterrey for another checkup. After a lot of prayer and better diet for Jessy (more protein), the baby is now 4.44 pounds and the doctor expects our baby to be 7 pounds by the end of these next four weeks. God has been in control, we had asked for a smaller baby than Josué so Jessy could have a natural birth and God is answering. We appreciate all of your prayers. Thanks a lot and God bless you.

As I mentioned in our last Newsletter, we had scheduled to start with English classes starting January. Needless to say we were expecting more people to come but so far Jessy has had an average of 10 students every Saturday. She is very excited about their progress though. Just this last Saturday, she wrote several paragraphs on the board and they were able to translate them into Spanish. We keep praying that more and more teens will come after March. We´ll have to suspend the classes for a month since we´ll be going to Monterrey from February 15th until the baby is born.

We´ve continued with our youth meetings every Saturday at at 4:00 p.m. It is a blessing to see them getting to church with their new Bibles and excited about coming to church. I spent two Saturdays teaching them about the history of the Bible, how it is that we´ve got it and how we can trust its content is accurate. I also taught them about how it is divided so that whenever I ask them to find a passage they would be able to do it. We´ve had games to see who can find the verses faster…that´s really helping them. God willing, we´ll be taking them on a trip to some caves that are about 20 minutes away from the village…they´re very excited about it and we are too. We´ll have games and a time to share from the Bible with them outdoors.

Another thing that we started is the Sunday School training for some of the ladies of the church. Jessy found a very good material to give this training and the ladies are really enjoying it. Jessy teaches them every Friday from 4:00-6:00 p.m. Please keep these ladies in your prayers, they know what a big responsibility this is but they´re willing to serve the Lord in this area. Elisa Torres will be the first one to start. Jessy has been teaching about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Elisa will start with Joseph´s life. We thank the Lord for all the Sunday School material that Grandma Kathryn Cornell donated to the mission…it has been very useful.

We´ve registered ourselves in a Nursing Aid online course that will help us to be better prepared to help in the medical needs in Norias. This last week we had Samuel González, a former student, and a 4th year Medical student, in our house. He came to stay with us to practice his medical knowledge and serve the people of the village as they came for medical help. But he not only did that, he helped us check all the medicine we had in store, get rid of all the medicine that was out of date and then classify all the medicine, put it in order and label it. This was an arduous job…it literally took him 5 days to do it. I was able to help him some and learned a lot from him. He explained to me what each medicine was for, its pros and cons and how to use it. I learned a lot about diabetes and the different treatments we have in our clinic. Now the pharmacy we have, looks very organized and we can find what we need in no time. We thank the Lord for his service and his willingness to teach me.

Last time the doctor was here, she asked me to help her with the little boy who had the second degree burns. Now, I´m the one giving him his wound therapy every other day. He has had a lot of progress, his arm pit is almost completely healed and I’m sure the rest of his arm will be healed by the time we need to go back to Monterrey for the baby’s birth. It was a little hard to do it at first because I had to scrape the scary tissue first so that it would heal better but doing this every other day is really helping.

Two weeks ago, our neighbor came looking for Jessy to talk to her about her marriage problems and looking for counsel. Jessy took the opportunity to witness to her and she accepted the Lord. Her name is Maggie and she has two children. She comes every Thursday morning to take a Bible study with Jessy. The most amazing thing is how after we started praying with her for her marriage, her husband began to change his attitude and he started reading the New Testament we gave her. Please pray for him too, his name is Florencio, that God will prepare his heart and that he’ll be saved soon.

In His Service,

Joshua, Jessica y Josué Cornell