July 4, 2006  What a summer so far!  After the driest winter in 100 years, we are now receiving daily moisture from an early and much welcomed monsoon season.  We have received around four inches of moisture spread out over the past ten days with thunderstorms forcasted every day for the next week.  With all that has happened this year so far, it would have been easy to think that the Lord had forgotten about this place, but oh how things have turned around now!

It started with a crazy dry off-season.  Going from 120 inches of snow in the 2004-2005 winter to less than 10 total inches of snow this year, things were not looking good.  The Gallinas River had dropped so low that the news reported that the city of Las Vegas could only keep up with the water demand for another 128 days.  The situation was not looking good.

To top the environmental challenges, the camp has had several set backs in the past two months.  Our summer began with an ambulance ride for one of our staff from a severe asthma attack.  One day later our full size flat bed 4x4, which we rely on so heavily up here, caught fire under the hood and burned to a crisp.  At one point two weeks later, both the Dodge and the 4-Wheeler were broken down leaving us with ZERO vehicles to operate just before our biggest camp of the season.  All this coupled by five wildfires within fifteen miles of our property (three of them within two miles!), four cabins flooded by the recent "blessing" of rain, lightning systematicly blowing out four phone modules and a system board adding to the usual two pages of maintenance issues written in ten font single-spaced...it goes without saying that it has been an interesting and challenging summer.

But God is good.  The Dodge and 4-wheeler are running again.  The rains are here and the fire danger is subsiding.  We have made it through the first four weeks of some amazing camps and are already over 100 students above last years registration totals by this point.  Last Thursday night ALONE we were witness to thirteen baptisms in the beautiful and FULL pond.  I should probably hold my tongue from complaints and sit back in awe of God, because He has been doing some awesome things in this place!

I know some major challenges await as we stare down the back stretch of our first summer at El Porvenir...but humbly I know that God will always suprise us with what He has been planning all along.  And we will yet give Him praise.  The privilage will be ours, and the glory will be HIS!