We had our "La Palabra de Dios es la Verdad" District Convention this past weekend and what a wonderful three days we enjoyed.
I don't have my pictures together yet since they're spread about between my tablet, point and shoot, and DSLR! I'll get to that eventually! But for now, some highlights.
The attendance jumped massively each of the three days! We had 1676 on Friday, 2500 on Saturday, and Sunday afternoon were just 72 short of 3000 people!!!! It was PACKED on Sunday. The assembly hall has just over 2600 seats I think, so they had to bring in a lot of plastic chairs too.
On Saturday we had the privilege of seeing 47 new brothers (14) and sisters (33) get baptized. The youngest was a nine year old girl, the oldest was a 79 year old brother. Also a sister in a wheelchair was baptized. With the support of her husband's shoulders she was able to stand up to answer the questions. We now have one new brother, and three new sisters in our congregation, ranging between 13 and 20 years old.
Charley had the privilege of being chairman of the program on Saturday afternoon. And of course we enjoyed the releases of all the same publications that all of you readers received.
There were some lovely interviews. Quite a few who were around back in the days when the work was very difficult here. One brother they interviewed was around when there were only 338 Jehovah's Witnesses in Nicaragua. As of the last annual report in August 2012 there are now 24,480 Witnesses in the country. He certainly has seen the fulfillment of Isaiah 60:22 in his lifetime.
They also interviewed a pioneer sister who until recently was in our circuit. Her name is Johanna and she was raised in a Christian household and baptized back in 1986 when she was a young girl. She talked about how the work was banned at the time, and literature only came in secretly. They used to have one Watchtower that they all had to make their own copy of. And they were assigned to preach in twos so as not to attract attention, but her partner often couldn't go out, so she often went preaching all by herself as a young one.
Those are just a couple of the wonderful interviews we listened to. It was faith strengthening to hear of all the challenges our dear friends here have overcome to remain faithful to Jehovah and put his Kingdom first in their lives.
The dramas were also very well presented. I don't have any pictures, but you've all seen it anyway, well, most of you reading this. The Esther drama on Sunday was very well presented, good acting on the part of Esther and Haman in particular!
There weren't a lot of congregations in our circuit assigned to this convention, so we got to make new friends from Managua. We enjoyed getting to know a missionary couple who are serving in a congregation in Managua. They've been here 20 years, and spent quite a number of years in circuit work down here. They were so much fun, and had such great stories, very refreshing to be around. We tried to make dinner plans with them but it never did work out.
We did get to enjoy the company of Brenda and Caleb the whole weekend. They came and stayed at our house since it's much quieter here. It's really noisy around their house at the minute since it's the holidays and people have some noisy traditions this time of year, and noisy traditions that they carry out at 3am when you're trying to sleep! Thankfully none of that goes on where we live, so we all slept very peacefully all weekend! And then last night we enjoyed Pizza Hut with them, our friends Justin & Adina, and our Circuit Overseer and his wife. It was a relaxing, encouraging, entertaining evening, providing a lovely close to the weekend.
Well, that's all for now. Hopefully soon I'll get my pictures together. Hope you're all doing well.
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