New Beginning

Year 2013 has lent us a great start. First of all, we placed the membership at High Pointe Church of Christ and said bye-bye to Prestoncrest Church of Christ. We were sad to leave behind a wonderful church family and a number of people there who prayed for us, who held our hands, who had provided us tremendous encouragement, mentoring, advises, and support over the past 11 years (18 years for David). At the same time, we really felt this is a right move for us. High Pointe COC is only six or seven minutes away from our house. We've been really enjoying the Wednesday night Bible study and all kinds of service projects, Sunday morning services and Sunday evening small groups. The people we met are just amazing! They not only embraced us with love and encouragement, but also shared with us how God use them to reach out in different compacities to the community and the world! We constantly meet wonderful people and feel blessed and inspired. David joked that "we are in the honeymoon period." There were very few Sundays that we didn't say "What a day!"

Emily and Andy enjoyed meeting new friends too. They bonded with more friends in this month at High Pointe than they had in the past several years. Most of their friends are the sweet kiddos who are a few years older than them. They treated them as their litter brother and sister. It was heart-warming to see their faces light-up every time when they saw their friends at church. Emily and Andy would pray for their new friends every night after we said our prayers.

As you know, FriendSpeak is in our family blood. We have to take it with us where we go. So right after we decided to attend High Pointe, we started to pray about the opportunity to start FriendSpeak here. And our prayers were answered in less than a month! We placed the membership on January 6th. The preacher asked us to make a video for FriendSpeak and LST with our story on January 13th. We made more footage for the video on January 20th. The video was out for the church before the Harvest Sunday on January 27th (http://www.missionaloutreachnetwork.com/video/the-david-and-wendy-woodward-story-let-s-start-talking). By February 3, the Harvest Sunday, we had our first FriendSpeak session at High Pointe with four wonderful readers! Everyone enjoyed a delicious chocolate cake and some fruit to celebrate the new beginning and to celebrate the Chinese New Year. We pray that God will continue to bring more workers/volunteers and readers to High Pointe; and that He will use us to serve our community more effectively!

The translation project for New Life Behavior that I've been working on had a pretty good progress. I finished translating two more courses into Chinese with some help from another Chinese Christian. If you are interested in reading their curriculum or taking their free courses, here is the website: www.nlbi.net in English, Chinese, Russian, and other languages. I found it very helpful to do some personal study with it.

Below is A New Year's Prayer that our church read during a sermon. Hope you find it encouraging!

May God make your year a happy one! Not by shielding you from all sorrows and pain, but by strengthening you to bear it, as it comes;
Not by making your path easy, but by making you sturdy to travel any path;
Not by taking hardships from you, but by taking fear from your heart;
Not by granting you unbroken sunshine, but by keeping your face bright, even in the shadows;
Not by making your life always pleasant, but by showing you when people and their causes need you most, and by making you anxious to be there to help.
God's love, peace, hope and joy to you for the year ahead.
~Anonymous


Here are a few pictures of this month:

 

(Relaxing in the sun)

(Having fun in the rain)

 

(Emily normally missed feeding the horses because she was at school. But today she did it!)

(Our Fifth anniversary tradition: taking picture with kids every 5 years. We got the best anniversary gift - our friend Gayla took the kids for the weekend so we had our first date night and watched the first movie in five years! The kids did great without us. I think we missed them more than they missed us.)

(Our little balloon man!)

 

(The kids love playing Hide and Seek. Here is how Andy does it:)

Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Chinese New Year!