Dear Friends:
What a wonderful time we had at our annual Christmas party! We currently have 11 churches from Palomas, El Entronque, Colonia Modelo, and Guadalupe Victoria participating in our ALAS DE AMOR scholarship program. And all of them pitched in helping to organize, prepare food, put on programs, and bring in tables and chairs, and then clean everything up when it was all over. It was great to see their involvement and participation! Our college students in the program spent the night before creating attractive signs for all of the games we had for the kids, and then they organized and ran the games for the younger kids. I kept thinking of the old adage, “Many hands make light work.” And it was really true!
We had about 30 volunteers show up to help from El Paso, Cd. Juarez, Santa Fe, Las Cruces and Durango. With all of that help, it was truly a great celebration! Our theme for the day was about God’s amazing love. He created us to love us. He desires to have a relationship with us. He wants to participate in our lives and in our families. He came to restore our relationship with Him. He wants to fill us with the knowledge of His love and to respond in love to Him. He wants us to see Him not only as our perfect Father, but also as one who lives with us as Jesus lived with us. And, He wants us to keep in mind that He is coming back to this earth to set the government in order. 700 years before Jesus was born Isaiah prophecied that God himself would come to earth as Jesus to show us the path to restored life with our Creator, and Isaiah 9 tells us that when He returns to this earth, He will establish His perfect everlasting government of Peace over the whole earth. He will be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Prince of Peace, Mighty God! So, this Christmas season, we are focusing on his first coming, when he sacrificed Himself for our sins so that we could be reconciled to Him, and also on His return, when He will come to judge the world, destroy the works of evil and all those who refuse to be reconciled to Him. He will restore individuals and families, and He will restore the world to its former beauty and perfection, creating a new heaven and a new earth! Here are pictures of our celebration.
There are many more pictures on our Facebook page, if you would like to look at them! We are thankful for you, our sponsors, who invested in these children! They are doing so well! We just received their report cards from the First semester, and many of them have excellent grades! Together, we are making a big impact on Palomas and the surrounding towns. May the Lord fill your Christmas with many more blessings!
Jim & Pat