First days of school, Birthdays, Anniversary, Another Licensed Driver and other Family Fun

 

The girls are off to a good start for the new school year.

They started at a new Christian School this year not too far from our home. We are grateful for this opportunity for them.

Time at Mamaw and Papaw's house.

Fun times with the cousins before school started. They made Christmas cookies and listened to Christmas music in July.

We had a great celebration for Jennifer's birthday. We were glad that Levi and Alanna were able to come for the weekend.

Apparently this is the only picture we got of Levi and Alanna's visit in late August ;-) Not a Levi visit without a game of Catan.

Jennifer and I celebrate 27 years of marriage on August 1st.

Watchout world: Joel passed his driver's test and now has his license. He has many changes in the last few weeks. He got a job, got his license and started at a vocational training center here taking cooking courses.

We are glad that Luke has reconnected with a friend from school from years ago. They have been able to hangout a bit. They both love our minor league baseball team here in Indy so we took them to a game a few weeks back. 

Red Nueva Vida USA Update

 One of the things I (Ben) get to do is work with the churches we serve in helping prepare them to use the resources we have. Our goal is to help move our churches towards forming and reproducing disicples, healthy churches and leaders. We offer several resources to help them work towards this goal. Our main resources is our disicpleship route. Here are a few trainings I have done recently.

This was at Iglesia Esperanza Viva a church here in Indianapolis. I was doing training on the next few steps in the discipleship process.

This is a retreat that another church in Indy did not too long ago.

This is a leadership training I helped with at New Life Church Indy.

This is a prayer time before a disicpleship group launched with this group.

This is an evangelism training I did in a church north of Chicago.

Thanks for the continued prayers and support for our family and ministry! 

We have seen the work grow from 4 churches, 10 disciples in our disicpleship route in January 2024 when I started in this role to now having 7 churches involved, 8 disicpleship groups with 114 disciples, and 9 leaders in training. All glory to God!

 

Summer Fun

 

This was a gathering for the 4th of July for Ben's side of the family. We had a great time eating, talking, laughing, swimming and celebrating birthdays and the 4th.

We had a gathering for our pastors and families at our home in June. It was a fun time of food, fellowship and prayer. It is not easy gathering busy pastors and their families so I was grateful for the time together.

These are 4 of the 7 Pastors Ben gets to serve.

We were also happy to see our friends from Guatemala the Harmans.

They were staying at this beautiful place on a lake about 2 hours north of Indianapolis.

Here is the whole crew. They have 7 kids and we have 8 so when we used to get our families together it was a crowd ;-)

The girls got to go bowling.

Daddy daughter date for ice cream. Already starting to tell them that any boy who wants to get close to them has to talk to Dad first ;-)

Of course. lots of library visits this summer.

Ben took a day retreat to pray and plan for the rest of the year. He is also working on a 5 year vision. Please pray for this process.

Lake House Trip

 We are grateful for some summer down time this past week. Levi and Alanna were able to be here for a a few days too. It is a beautiful place and great to have extended time together relaxing. See some of the fun below.

This is from our traditional dinner at Cracker Barrel.

We spent lots of time in the water!

Emma most of the time preferred the baby pool.

Trip To Colombia

 Ben took a trip to Colombia at the end of May/beginning of June for some annual meetings with all the other country coordinators. It is always a great time of hearing what God is dong globally through New Life Network. It is also a sweet time of prayer and fellowship with fellow co-laborers. We also had a retreat with the pastors in Colombia and some from Venezuela. Ben was impacted by the challenges confronting the church in Venezuela. See some pictures from this time below:

Our car ride in a compact car with all our suitcases from the airport to the place where we were staying.

During our time with the coordinators we all shared a report and prayed for each other.

Yeison and Liliana did a great job leading. Yeison is now the coordinator of Colombia. (He served with us in Guatemala)

This was our tourist day where we took the public transportation around Medellin Colombia. They have nice public transportation.

More time of sharing

More worship and prayer together.

More pics of our fun tourist day.

Over the weekend we served the pastors in Colombia at one of the churches there.

This was a workship that Daniel and Ben led on Developing a Culture of Discipeship.

This was another workshop we did on global missions.

This was a friend that came and served with us in Guatemala and lives in Medellin.