We hope that you and your family have a wonderful and blessed New Year!
This is our prayer card that we mailed out this year and we hope it gets on lots of our friends and families refrigerators 🙂 We really do love and appreciate the support for our family as missionaries here in Nicaragua and to know that hundreds of people who love us are praying for us is the greatest encouragement we could ask for! Amen.
We left some of our prayers cards in the post office when we were home for Thanksgiving, please grab one next time you are near the Coral Gables campus. If you would like to get one in the mail, send your address to us at [email protected] and we will send one from Nicaragua. We can also add you to our mailing list if you would like to receive our newsletter in the mail. I know there are digital “refrigerators” too, and so we hope this digital version of the card will point your prayers in our direction too!
We really like to put pictures of friends on our fridge, so if you have some Christmas cards left over we would love to get one in the mail down here. You can mail it to…
Los Farringtons
Apartado Postal MJ43
Managua, Nicaragua Central America
I have said this several times, “I hope that 2019 is better than last year.” There is real hurt underneath that little line this year. The truth is, I don’t think we have ever gone through a year as difficult as this one. In the country we love and in our lives personally we have suffered some hardships that we could have never imagined. It has been a year where we have clung to the promise of God that He would hold us as we are suffering. We are not guaranteed when we give our lives to Jesus Christ that we would never suffer. His promise is that when we do suffer we would be held. We have needed God’s presence around us so very much this year. We are thankful that God knows us personally and has been here with us. (It is a beautiful Christmas song “O come of O come Emmanuel”, God is with us.)
Our friend Kerry Hasenbalg, who is an incredible teacher, wrote this yesterday “I have come to understand that brokenness isn’t something that can always be avoided in this life. Certainly, there are some sorrows we can avoid by staying away from volitional sin. But sometimes humans are “pushed off the counter,” so to speak, and end up shattered upon the floor. Other times God calls us to actively go into broken places to care for broken people, and in the process, we get broken ourselves. This is what Jesus did, and it is what He calls us to do also. Perhaps it’s less about avoiding brokenness and more about learning to properly Re-TREAT the broken pieces, so that we don’t become defined by them, but rather BECOME continually Re-MEMBERED in Him.”
As I read that second part a tear filled my eyes. It is truth and it is encouraging. If you are going through hard times we hope you are encouraged too. As we begin 2019 we lean into God even more to take care of us and keep us together.
We continue to try to understand how He is working in things that seem so dark. We will also continue to serve Jesus in the middle of it all, that is the purpose of our lives. Good News has come and eternity is the end game. We lay our brokenness at the feet of Jesus, and are expecting Him to take care of it all. As long as we have life, we will bring the Faith, Hope, Love, Truth and Life that is only found in Jesus to whoever the Lord puts in our path.
We look forward to this coming year. We are praying for the dark cloud to be lifted and for things to get better! Amen.
We are thankful to have you with us too.
God Bless your 2019!
Chris & Krista Farrington
