VBS 2010: Someone's Gonna Get Slimed! from Foothills Church on Vimeo.

See some of the fun we've been having at Superheroes VBS this week and listen in at the end when Will Busch gives his summation of a good sliming.

Papalote 4: Mas agua! from Foothills Church on Vimeo.

Papalote 3: Bible Institute work from Foothills Church on Vimeo.

Papalote 2: Clean up from Foothills Church on Vimeo.

Papalote 1: Nueva Era Building Site from Foothills Church on Vimeo.

The team here has seen God do some amazing things and we´ve heard some gripping stories. We have seen overwhelming poverty and heard about lives transformed in miraculous ways.

For me, there is a personal side to what we´ve seen and heard. My family is from Mexico, but I was born in the United States and have lived well. I know that my family in Mexico has struggled with a lot of the pain we´ve seen here, particularly abuse of women and children. This is something I´ll be praying about as I return home. It´s so personal, but I put it here on the Foothills blog so that my church family can know that Mexico´s struggles are my own, our own.

Like on our East Asia trip last year, God has given me encouragement throughout the week. The one that sticks out in my mind is finding a small Bible in a muddy bank, left there by a recent flood. The Bible was open to Psalm 136, which tells us that ¨his love endures forever.¨I love it that God speaks to me from flood debris, and that the word he gives is about enduring, everlasting love because that is what people here need to know about. From what Ilene has shared with me, the culture in Mexico believes in limited love. There´s not enough love for all of your children, for example. I´ve seen that in my own family, too, as my  grandmother was separated from her twin at a young age and one was allowed to thrive and the other forgotten. Such sadness, but such a hope when people hear of God´s unending and unlimited love.

Thanks for letting me share. See you in Oregon.

- Elena Hammond

We have a bunch of photos on our Facebook page you can see over here. What the pictures don´t tell you is the vast information we´ve learned from Don and Ilene Nagle, the missionaries here who oversee the Bible Institute. They have a deep understanding of the culture here and the connections between Papalote and other parts of Mexico and the United States.

Janna Reece is busy teaching haircutting skills to a woman who plans with her husband to return to a remote village it Oaxaca, Mexico, this summer. Many Oaxacans have migrated to Papalote. The Oaxacans are part of Mexico´s indigenous people, so life in Oaxaca is very basic compared to even Baja. Natty and Benny have spent many years in Papalote, but will return to Oaxaca this summer as missionaries to their own people. Ilene said that U.S. missionaries have spent years reaching out to Oaxaca, but the Oaxacans really only trust their own people. So, it is knowing that they return to a different life that Natty and Benny go to Oaxaca. Natty is a quick learner and is following Janna´s instructions on cutting hair so that she´ll have a way to minister to the people in her Oaxacan village.

My hour is about up. God bless and see you soon!

-Elena Hammond

We are busy working at the Bible Institute and getting ready at various construction sites to pour concrete. Today the women visited a woman who needed her property cleaned and medical attention for her children. We may return tomorrow.

We also visited the dump site. Seeing the dump and helping clean the woman´s property was eye opening for us. It is hard to see people living in such poverty. What´s special about Mexico is that Jesus represents for some their only and greatest hope out of such extreme situations, whether it´s poverty, abuse or physical pain.

We are learning a lot about Don and Ilene´s mission in Papalote and beyond. Ilene shares her skills as a nurse with many. They are training and sending missionaries to Oaxaca, which is where many people in Papalote originate. The Oaxacans are part of Mexico´s indigenous population and are best reached by their own people.

Lots of fun with the children, including soccer, ice cream, crafts and a homemade swing in the back of Bob Croff´s truck. The kids found his ropes and tied them together to make a big swing. Maybe we´ll get pictures of that, too.

Miss you all. We covet your prayers.

We arrived Saturday (yesterday) at the Bible Institute run by Don and Ilene Nagel of Northern Lights Ministry. The women at the institute fed us a yummy meal of sopas. We had a brief orientation, played with the kids and made new friends.

Today, we got to visit the site where our team and probably several more to follow will build a home for Francisco (aka Junior) and his family. The site is to be a home for the parsonage and the church that Francisco pastors on his school bus. Don also took us on a tour of Papalote. You might be surprised to know that many of our fruits and vegetables we buy at home are grown right here. There are many greenhouses and some 30,000 people come to this valley every year to help grow and harvest.

In the meantime, our team is doing a lot of work around the Bible Insitute, including getting forms ready to pour concrete and putting in a new electrical line from the box on the street, which is rusted and not dependable.

Tonight we will have church services and an ice cream social.

Most of us do not have phone reception, and access to the Internet is limited, so keep praying for us and trust that we´ll return safely.

:::Elena Hammond

Tony & Salem PRC Update from Foothills Church on Vimeo.

Tony's Class from Aaron Carson on Vimeo.

You, too, can be a part of the English Camp experience this summer. Contact Bob Croff for details.

Check out the following video of Tony Frazier at the PRC last Friday and the blog below from Katie Cardwell. Loving it!

Tony at the Salem PRC #2 from Foothills Church on Vimeo.

Kim Copple’s message of Redemption a few Sundays ago touched my heart. The stories shared of redeemed lives moved me, and from what I saw I wasn’t the only one! As you may know, the Salem Pregnancy Resource Center (where Kim works) was in need of some serious renovating. Their ultimate goal is to get status as a medical facility. They need that status in order to qualify for a grant from Focus on the Family that will help them purchase an ultrasound machine.

Now, the renovation is no light task, and there was a call for financial and physical support. Being a poor college student myself I didn’t have much to give financially, so I decided to offer up my time and an extra pair of hands to help in any way I could. I showed up Saturday morning on January 30, coffee cup in hand, not sure what to expect. I knew I wasn’t skilled in contracting, and I had no knowledge of power tools (other than the potential for injury to myself, of course), and altogether I feared I would be useless. Those fears were almost immediately eliminated as Tony Frazier put me to work. Even without “tool skills” I was able to take part in something beautiful.

To see the body of Christ at work in response to a need is beautiful. People of all ages and walks of life gave up their time on a Saturday morning (and for others, time during their weeks) to help the Salem Pregnancy Resource Center without expecting anything in return. All the work being done financially and physically at PRC is a prime example of God’s people living with open hands and open hearts.

I pray that the work being done at PRC will lead to people’s lives being touched by God and to lives being saved in more than one way. There is a clear need in this broken world for compassion, honesty, integrity, kindness and helpfulness — and to have the church jump in and take up these callings, I believe, will bring hope and healing to the broken world. This is “A Whole Church for the Broken World” in action my friends, and it is invigorating to see the body of Christ move to immediate action to make this world better and to show people the love of God.

Really, it’s difficult to express the joy I feel when I speak about the community service activities I have access to at Foothills.  I find my friends, acquaintances and random strangers I chat with startled by the fact that a church is doing all of that. I feel blessed to be a part of a church so willing to jump in and help the community and other communities as well! The work being done at the Pregnancy Resource Center is a glorious reflection of God’s love and compassion, and the chance to be a part of it is positively thrilling! I’m personally excited to see what more there is to be done through our church.
— Katie Cardwell

We baptized 13 people at Foothills Church on Valentine's Day, including Amanda Nichols, Justin Nichols, Grant Burns, Greg Busch, Craig Busch, Dustin Wright, Jason Christman, Sarah Orr, Alex Reece, Katie Cardwell, Lilly Green, Melissa Hermann and Ryele Bledsoe.

Here Katie Cardwell shares about her baptism experience:

This past Sunday I had the privilege of being baptized. I’ve been a believer since age five, yet I never got around to baptism. That’s in part because I am irrationally fearful of my head going under water, but after examining my heart these past few months I found it really boiled down to an issue of pride. Why did I need to get dunked in water publicly to affirm my faith? Sure, Jesus Christ himself was baptized and called us to do the same but it wasn’t really that important, was it? I didn’t need it, I didn’t want it and for the longest time I was not willing to be humble and obey.

With a lot of the changes I’ve been making in my life recently, the question of baptism came up again. I talked about it with wise mentors in my life with hopes they would tell me it was too late, I might as well not bother and that it was all right if I didn’t get baptized. Not surprisingly they rebuked that train of thought outright and I knew what needed to be done. I would need to let go of my pride and irrational fears and give God control. There were no more excuses because the importance of baptism was revealed to me –– and the truth has a way of sticking around once you know about it. There was no going back.

So I prayed long and hard to God. I still battled with Him about it. Looking back I see how silly I acted. My God who redeemed me, saved me and offered me love, compassion and eternal life was asking me to do this for Him and I was fighting it! Eventually I talked to Bart and got on the list to be baptized just after the first of the year. However, God had a different idea, and my sister who was to read my testimony ended up being out of town that weekend and things didn’t work out. I was crushed and confused, because if God was calling me to this why wasn’t he working everything out?

I realized during the January baptism service that God was calling me to first sit and listen. It was obvious to Him, and finally to me, that my heart wasn’t ready. I never imagined that preparing for baptism would be this difficult. But the more truth you know, the less you can ignore it, and I was ignoring where my heart was truly turned. Had I been baptized that day it wouldn’t have been for God, it would have been for me. That was wrong thinking. I’m glad it didn’t work out, because it gave me more time to think, more time to pray and more time to realize what this meant. That Sunday I listened to the testimonies of changed lives, I prayed, I pondered and I went home and wrote my testimony because it was then that I knew God thought I was ready.

I thought it was perfect when I learned the next baptisms were to be on Valentine’s Day. What could be a better representation of love than giving up everything for the God who saved me, all my pride and anxiety, in order to obey and make my faith public? So on Sunday, February 14, I showed up in cut-offs, flip-flops, and my Switchfoot t-shirt ready to get pushed under water in front of a room full of people. Talk about nerve wracking! My fears, however, were slowly beaten back as I made my way to my seat, being greeted, hugged and congratulated by my brothers and sisters in Christ. My family and friends were there to watch me in my obedience to Christ and I felt fantastic.

The baptism itself brought back all that anxiety I had been feeling as I sat in the pleasantly warm baptistry and listened as my words and testimony were spoken by my sister. I felt peace as those words engulfed me and the truth of God’s work in my life was spoken. There is no other word that could describe what I felt once my sister had fallen silent and Mark, a wonderful mentor to me, spoke his part. Peace and wholeness in Christ was all that I could think about, along with the thought of, “here it comes!” as I was pushed under the water and pulled back up in a perfect representation of Christ’s sacrifice for my life and the cleansing that took place there.

Of course there was the unpleasant, soaking wet scrambling out afterward, followed by changing in the bathroom, but none of that seemed to matter. In my heart, after coming out of that water, something seemed to click into place. A cycle was complete. God waited for me to be obedient to Him and His word, and a ritual I avoided for over a decade is now one of those shining memories of God’s work in my life.