Last Week For The Americans

Its so sad. The Americans are leaving. Sara Love and Bentley Crawford, Natalie, and Breanna are all leaving within the next week. They have all been here two years with the exception of Sara Love who came on STINT here in 2006 before she was married so she has lived here 3 years. They have made so many friends and impacted this city for the gospel so much. Last night we had a dinner with our church and the goodbyes and the reminiscing started. Bentley and I have become good friends as well as the Crawfords have a daughter, Lila Grace, close to the same age as Grant. They are going to live in Miami to get a job and join a Sovereign Grace church there. Breanna is going to help out with the Magdalena film in Florence for another month before she goes to America to get a job.

This week we are moving a lot of their stuff to a really cheap storage unit we found close to the university. So we are boxing their stuff up and storing it for future STINT teams since we will not have one next year. Please pray for that.

A highlight from this week is that I got to meet with Gaetano for 4 hours on Thursday. He is one of the students that have professed faith in Christ from the summer project group. We talked about many things including the Bible being extremely metaphorical. Please pray for me as I continue to talk about interpretation of the Bible to him and how part of the Bible is metaphorical and part is literal.

Here are some pictures of our friends over time:

Above, Lila and Sara Love Crawford
Lila and Bentley Crawford
Bentley and I hiked a mountain, this is Bentley at the top.

Bentley with Braden from summer project and some people from Panta Rei, the student government group

Natalie at one of our friend's, Andrea's concert
Breanna, Coitaiba, me and Jutty in language class

Our whole language class from Febraury

Back to Normal Life

The summer project just left Sunday. We are still trying to get used them not being here. They brought so much life to the city. Their intentionality with the gospel in relationships with the students was clutch for us. They were able to survey a lot of people to see who was spiritually interested. There are a ton of new contacts that I have gotten to know through them.

One of the main people are Emanuele or "Manny". He wants to be in a community of Christians. He understands how important this is after receiving Christ and seeing how we interacted with each other. He is really easy to talk to and loves America. He hopes to come to America at the end of August to visit all his friends in Mississippi and will probably be a good person to recruit others.

Others are two friends Gaetano and Francesco. These guys both are asking questions want to know more about the Bible. On my facebook profile you can check out Gaetano giving his testimony. I got to meet with him today and talk about "how God can still love us when people go to hell".

The other key group that we met is Panta Rei. I have met close to 15 people through this group including the president. He is extremely interested in doing service projects with us in the future. They are the student government group on campus and when the summer project went in their room and starting talking about the Bible they all wanted to listen to the scriptures being read in Italian. There are a lot of them that are close to accepting Christ. It is the first time we have started seeing God move in existing community on campus in a long time. These groups is the closest thing you can get to Greek Life and they seem like one big happy family.

Continue to pray for these people and groups as well as our team as the other 4 Stinters here are leaving in two weeks.

Here are some cool pictures and video:

Above, I took the summer project guys to my favorite pizza place, Pummarola 'Ncoppa

Antonio, Ambrogio, and I

We made the newspaper in Salerno. The picture is from one of our BBQ and the article talks about why we are here.

Partial video of Caleb, one of the summer projecters, giving his testimony at a BBQ and Marko translating.