Mission: Esther

This Summer, along with the four churches we served through construction, we also had the opportunity to come alongside children in a foster care type program.

One of these children was Esther. Esther was born to a mentally handicapped mother in Costa Rica. In a country like Costa Rica there is little hope for a child in this situation. She was seized by the government and was blessed to be assigned to the Christian foster care organization called Casa Viva.

After many interviews and training sessions, Esther was placed in the home of a young Costa Rican family. This family took Esther in and made her a part of their extended family.

After some time, the family began to notice brown water coming in through their back wall and even up through the floor. They discovered that the neighbor’s septic system was leaking in through the concrete!

As a Casa Viva family, they qualified for additional support from our summer teams. While construction continued on the church, I led a team of 5 students to the home of Esther to stop the leakage.

We sealed the walls, and laid a tile floor that has stopped the sewage water leakage. Now the family could again use their entire house again.

What a blessing it was for that family. What a blessing for Esther to be placed in a Christian home like this.

Speaking at Wheaton Academy 9/12

Today, September 12,2006 I spoke at Wheaton Academy and taught about the name change that Paul took on in the Acts 13.

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If you'd like the notes that I passed out to the students who listened, drop me an email and I'll gladly share them with you.

Speaking at Wheaton Academy 9/7

I spoke at Wheaton Academy on September 7th, 2006 and talked about the name change that Simon Peter experienced, when Jesus Christ changed Simon's name.

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If you'd like a copy of the notes I passed out to students... drop me an email (matt@leadertreks.com) I'd gladly share them with you

Returned from Costa Rica

Earlier this month my wife Kristin and I returned from Costa Rica after spending 8 weeks in San Jose working with 4 LeaderTreks teams. While in Costa Rica we did construction on 4 different churches.

The first church we worked on was a tiny church that had several hundred people attending it. They were packed in. Standing room only, as a matter of fact when we came to visit the church they made 20 Ticos (Costa Ricans) get up so that we would have a place to sit.

The church had begun to put a big new tin roof on, we came in and filled 4 feet of dirt, built walls and poured a large concrete floor. By the end of the two weeks the church had tripled it's sanctuary and had room for plenty more new Christians.

One day while we were working on the church it began to pour rain... but the student leaders said they wanted to complete the dirt filling. So literally I stood in 6-8 inches of mud shoveling and shoveling in the pouring rain for several hours. It was the longest hardest day of work we did all summer long, but we saw more work accomplished than we thought possible.

What a great day it was!