As many of you know, we invited a friend of ours, Julia Seagrist, to come down here for a year with the ABWE AMP program to help care for our kids while we are in language school. Last week, after some severe abdomen pain and eventually yellow eyes, we learned that she passed a gall bladder stone. Not only that, but it was discovered that she still has 30 or more stones in her gall bladder! After many exams and blood tests, it has been determined that removing the gall bladder is the best action at this point. So, Julia is scheduled for gall bladder surgery on Tuesday morning, April 20, at 10:30 am.

We are very comfortable and confident with the doctor that God has provided to do the surgery. He was the on-call doctor at the ER we went to last Friday night and it “just so happens” that he specializes in gall bladders!! God is so good, isn’t he?

We are asking for you to pray for several things related to all of this:

1. Julia has one more blood test that needs to show improvement in some liver enzymes on Saturday. Please pray the results are good or we will have to move the surgery.

2. Teresa needs some extra energy because the same day Julia has surgery, the boys MK teacher Carol is having surgery. So, Teresa will be homeschooling them for a few days in the midst of spending time at the hospital, caring for Julia, and doing language school. (Please pray for Carol too! She’s having surgery on her esophagus valve.)

3. Most importantly, pray for a smooth surgery Tuesday morning and a smooth recovery following.

Thanks so much for all your prayers. We will let you know how everything goes!

Serving God in Brasil,

Lucas and Teresa Bair

UPDATE: Julia’s surgery went well and she is back home with the Bair’s recovering.

We have gone back to school after a 7 week summer break. At the beginning of the break, I was like, “7 weeks! I don’t want to miss school for 7 weeks!”. The week before we returned to school I was like, “7 weeks!! I don’t want to go back to school after 7 weeks!!”. It was so nice to have a break from studying and just be a mom and wife. We had a great break. We traveled the area a little, visited the beach a few times, even had a group come down from one of our supporting churches. It was really great to have visitors.

Well, we have completed 2 weeks since we returned. I think we’re adjusting well to jumping back in. Yesterday, I gave my first devotional in portuguese for class. It is certainly a different experience giving a devotional in a language that I speak like a preschooler. Really what it consisted of was thinking in english in words I could translate into portuguese and writing them on paper. It was more of a 3 minute testimony about a passage that is dear to my heart than it was a devotional. I actually thought it was way too fluffy and it seriously annoyed me, but it was as far as my current portuguese would take me! Then the actual presentation itself was simply reading the written out devotional in portuguese. I’m not sure how I did, but it was kinda cool to talk about the Lord in a different language! Lucas gives his this coming Friday…

We are settling into a church, which is great. It is “Comunidade Crista” in the Rincão bairro. (A bairro is like a village or neighborhood in cities. Cities here are all broken up into bairros.) We love it. We love the people. We love the pastor and family. The first time we visited in November we really felt like it was where we belonged. I’m sure I’ll share more about it in blogs to come.

Here is a video of highlights of Crossway Community Church’s recent visit.