More Old Photos

Yesterday I wanted to include a photo where you could see the beautiful coat/hat set Mother made for me, but I had left the completed albums with my parents. Then, sorting through the hundreds more Mother excitedly provided for continuation of the gigantic project, I found another copy! Now, use your imagination to visualize the colors--turqouise and brown velvet trim.

I also discovered an early forgotten photo: I am drinking mate at a young age! For those who are not acquainted with this social Argentine custom, just google it! It's like a green-tea infusion partaken of in a circle of family or friends, all drinking from the same gourd and metal filtering straw--great fellowship and flavor, IF you have the acquired taste!

During hurricane season I kept remembering my closest encounter with natural disaster as a young child and wondering whether there might be a photo to go with my memory. I came across one yesterday!

We were living in La Carlota, province of Córdoba, on a ranch-type large estate with a 15-room house that we shared with a new missionary couple, James and Margaret Marshall. (I remember always wanting to go visit them in their quarters and being told over and over by my Mother that I would surely wear out my welcome.) It was from that setting that I recall looking out the window and watching the terrible storm which we called huracán or ciclón (probably neither one the correct term).

At the time, Daddy was building his first church, literally. After the whatever-it-was had passed over, the first thing he did was go check on his work. And this is what he found: the walls, ready to be roofed, had collapsed.

I was too young to comprehend the emotions he must have gone through at the sight. I do know that he perservered and rebuilt from the rubble a practical and pleasing structure that still stands--el Templo Evangélico de La Carlota.

Today I read and related to the words of Psalm 102:23a: "In the course of my life he broke my strength..." There have been many instances of brokenness in our family history. BUT God's faithfulness has remained a constant.