Then, on Sunday, we were invited to a house warming... Anja, the newest staff member in our YWAM Alhaurin team, is living in a new hospitality villa that is just 500m from Villa Rehoboth. We're calling it Villa Bethany, because Bethany in the Bible was a place where Jesus often enjoyed hospitality at the home of a family who lived there. On Sunday afternoon before church, we went to Bethany for a house warming, combined with a "yurt warming."
You're no doubt asking yourself what a yurt is. Well, you can see one in the photo above. A yurt is a portable, bent wood-framed dwelling structure, traditionally used by nomadic peoples in the steppes of Central Asia. A friend, Bianca, who lived in Kyrgystan for a while, has come back to Spain to study, and wanted to put up the yurt in her parents' garden. When the local council refused to give permission for that, she decided to move just a few hundred metres along the road and have the yurt built at Villa Bethany instead. So now there's a yurt next to Bethany, and Bianca shares the villa's bathroom and kitchen with Anja. Yesterday was a time for friends and family to visit the villa and the yurt and enjoy some afternoon "tapas" together.
As Easter approaches, we're also gearing up for our spring training courses. This week, we'll be hosting another coaching workshop, and then our staff will be arriving for the six-week leadership development course that we hold here during April and May. This week I went to the butcher's and ordered my own weight in chicken breasts! I also went to the printer's and handed in the manuals that need to be printed for the LDC. So tomorrow, we'll be picking up fifteen thousand photocopies and sixty kilos of chicken. We'll also be heading to the airport ten or twelve times to pick up the workshop participants and the LDC staff. And amidst the activity of seminars and workshops, there will be church activities to help us remember Jesus' death and celebrate His resurrection together. It's going to be a full and fulfilling week.
