Good Times

Here are some random pics of life lately.

Sophie and Jesse baking chocolate chip cookies one Sunday afternoon (with their little helper, Rachel, of course.)

This is what our table looks like on a normal night. From left to right, Rachel, Keri, Schielah, Laura, Sarah, Sophie, Jesse, Stephanie and Bop Bop. Thankfully, our large table comfortably seats all of us.

Rachel and Mathis love having big sisters to play with. Here is Jesse playing Barbies.

and a silly picture of Mathis, just for fun.

Matthew 5:14-16

This is the theme verse for our school this year. Rachel memorized it with her class.

Student Leaders

Really? My last post was Sep 10? I can't believe how time is flying. I can say that having five girls in addition to our own family certainly keeps me busy. Whew!

Anyway - last week a select group of juniors and seniors from ECA were privileged to attend a Student Leadership Conference for ACSI schools (Assoc. of Christian Schools Int'l, of which we are a part) held in Budapest, Hungary. One of our dormies, Jessica, was one of those selected to go. This morning in chapel, the group shared some of what they learned and gave a challenge to our ECA middle and high school students. (Click on pictures to make them larger)

Mr. Madsen, on guitar, was one of the teachers who led the group and who also has attended this particular conference every year for the last 12 years (I think). He was also in charge of worship for the conference.

The middle and high school students in chapel this morning.

Daniel is the student body president this year. Here he is sharing what he learned at the conference.

Here are Jessica and Susie, talking about a workship they attended on the plight of orphans around the world.

And here is Andrew giving his challenge to live for now and not to be afraid of being laughed at or mocked for doing what you know is right.

As each student shared, they talked about different Biblical leaders, such as Saul, David, Nehemiah and Esther, and what we can gain from their stories and challenges they faced. They closed with a few questions for us to ponder and reflect.

How am I living dangerously?
Am I willing to do what is right?
Am I willing to be laughed at or rejected by my peers for doing the right thing?
Who have I laughed at for doing what is right?
How is God calling me to live dangerously?

Language fun

For three weeks we are privileged to have with us two girls who are the daughters of an Irish mother and an Australian father. The girls don't have particularly strong accents, but in the last 48 hours we have had fun noting the differences in vocabulary. For example:

One of them came down to breakfast this morning and asked, "Where can I find the cuttle-ree?" "The what?" I said? "Cuttle-ree." "Oh, cutlery! Silverware, you mean."

Yesterday one of them had a headache and asked for the Mah-trin, (Motrin).

"Capsicum" is their word for red bell pepper. "Bikkie" is cookie.

I love listening to them. And I think it's awesome that we are a minority in our home right now with 2 Irish/Australians, a Columbian and a Philipino.

Good times. :)

10 ways to pray for us

This is a video done by Jacob Bock, a veteran missionary here in Madrid, whose kids have attended ECA. He tells 10 ways to pray for missionaries and we wanted to post it to ask you to pray this way for us and for others.

Camarma en fiestas

David and Rachel went to a "bull fight" Friday night. In a traditional bull fight, the bull is killed by the matador during the fight. In the event that we attended, however, there were 12 recortadores who perform acrobatics around the bull. Here are a couple of five second videos to give you an idea of what it was like:

Obviously, this can be rather dangerous. One of the recortadores tripped when running from the bull, which gave Rachel a fright. The bull roughed him up a good bit, but the others rescued him and he walked away!

One other note of interest - the guy who was walking around selling raffle tickets for the leg of ham that he was carrying. It was raffled off near the end of the evening.

Multi-lingual

One interesting thing we have noticed is the multi-language labeling on food products here. Because Europe has so many languages represented in such a small area, food distributors just

print them all, I guess.

Can anyone tell me what languages these are?

Here I'm guessing italian, Dutch, English and Greek?

Sometimes they make it easy.