This morning Ann and I wake up to an empty house. Katie left last night and now we have 6 days of freedom before the family starts arriving. It's a nice first day alone too, because it is a national holiday-- "Corpus Crispy" as Ann refered to it. Actually, I informed her, it's Corpus Cristi. As far as I can tell it is a holiday that the Catholic Church invented a long time ago that centers around the celebration of the Eucarist as an attepmt to renew the faithful's devoutness to Christ. It is still celebrated all over the Catholic world, but Bolivia is one of the few countries where it is still a holiday. Maybe we'll go out for fried chicken to celebrate Ann's version of the holiday. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much we will be able to enjoy it since we both woke up two days ago coughing and it is now a full-blown sinus infection/dry heaving cough that gives you a headache and quite an abb workout from all the hard coughing. Other than that we are doing fairly well. I just wanted to comment a little bit more about church these days, sice we've been talking about that a little in our house the last week or two.

When we first got here, there was hardly anyone in the church, and then it began to explode. Next thing we knew there were 35 youth on Saturday nights and the Sunday service was packed. We had 8 or 10 ladies show up for the coop, regularly had a dozen people over for bible study on Tuesday nights, and the pastor was really excited about how much God was blessing us. Then in the past couple of months people just stopped showing. We canceled the Bible study (which was really just because we needed a break from all the weekly events), now about 3 women show up to coop, we're lucky to get 10 youth on Saturday night, and even soccer nights have all but stopped because the 15 or 20 kids who used to show up don't any more. What's going on? I know numbers aren't everything and that is not our church's focus, but really, what is going on? We have a few theories. We've been wary of all this growth from the beginning because we really have hardly any organizational structure to the church, no way of following up with all the new people, and all the responsability falls to the pastor. I admit even we could do better on this part. We just finished a 3-day evangelistic campaign two weekends ago and we tried to convince the leadership that maybe we should focus right now on all the people that have already shown interest in the church and then fallen to the wayside. Katie suggested that maybe it has something to do with just the regular ebb and flow of life here. People come and go, they lose jobs or get a new one, they move to a cheaper place that is too far away, they just get tired from working so hard every day. But I think that is all the more reason to visit and follow up with how people are doing. And why would soccer night all at once just end? we still show up on Monday nights, but only 3 or 5 others do. It's strange.

Anyways, we are having a leadership meeting on Saturday to evaluate where we are right now. Pray that it goes well, that the Spirit will inspire our members to really care for their neighbors and give to the church, and that our church will continue to build a strong foundation as we all are figuring out just what church is about and what we are supposed to do.