CR to Honolulu and back again

I suppose these posts are like a puzzle in that I leave out large pieces of happenings and loop you in most often only on the fruit of them. That said, we just returned from Hawaii.

Matt and I started seriously considering visiting my Grampa after my mom encouraged us too in light of the rapid progress of his dimensia/alzheimers. I have not seen him since 93'. He is a retired Marine (Sgt Major) and lives off Waikiki beach in Honolulu. My sister and Brother n law were going to be there over the Thanksgiving Holiday, and then to top off the decision, a future job opportunity surfaced and there was a location option to interview in Hawaii during the opportune window of time. So... 13 hours of travel, with lay overs in Guatemala and Los Angeles, we are back home in San Jose. Every plan ride became more and more Spanish filled in the seats. With a solid weeks worth of fresh Hawaiian memories- family, cook out, snorkeling, restaurants, redbox, the beach, Polynesian sites, lots of photos... we all stayed together in my Grampa's apartment. For those of you with any military family, you know how careful we had to be to keep that place spotless every day.

Our taxi driver who took us to the airport Thanksgiving day for our departing flight to Hawaii was named Emmanuel. He is 26, a believer, going through some family drama and shared he has not been to church for months with his work schedule/s. We arranged to have him pick us up when we got back in, and lo and behold he kept his word and he was there with a smile and ready hands for our bags when we arrived this morning. Needless to say, but after 3 back to back flights, not bartering with a random taxi driver and explaining directions to our Barrio in Spanish was A BLESSING. He is planning to come to church with us and Suantzy this Sunday. For those of you willing, please pray that he does.

An unexpected pause Hawaii was from our new life here, Football in English was a fleeting luxury for Matt :) I have 2 pages worth of indirect and direct pro noun sentence structure homework to do, that was very intentionally neglected over the last week. But we are well, and were back to our rice and chicken dinner this evening :)

If you have a few moments, we have some prayer requests:
- Getting back into the swing of school
- Where should we be serving the community? There is a Christian Community Center around the corner from us (we ran into it walking a different route home from school) called, "Unidos por Cristo" or United by Christ. We are hoping there may be opportunities to get involved through this. We found there website and plan to email the woman this week. There is also the Sports camp not far from here and there is an orphanage we could serve through the school.
- A church home close to the house