Radford, Here We Come!!

So it has been a while since I have posted my last blog and some great things have happened. One of those things is that the COVE Team spent a week in Virginia. We stayed at a lake house about one hour and a half away from Blacksburg, VA. It was a great time of catching up with each other and building vision for the upcoming year. During this time we found out who our partners will be and what school we will be going to individually. If you click here, you will see some pictures of our weekend, during this weekend we found out our partners and which schools we will be going to. My partner is Collin Setterberg and we will be working at Radford University. Radford is a medium size school, about 10,000 students, but the town is really small - it's definitely a college town! Haley Devine (my future roommate) and Douglas Rose will be working at Virginia Tech, which is a little bigger (about 26,000 students). While we were in Virginia we got to go to RU and walk around for a little while, it's a great campus. The students were very friendly and easy to talk to, we also noticed that a lot of the students smoke, this might seem like a random comment, but considering the fact that we had just been to Virginia Tech and saw ONE, then we went to RU and saw a lot more than that, we took notice.
Besides checking out the campuses, one of the best things about the week was getting to be around the whole team. I loved being around the kids and feeling like we were a family, thinking for each other and watching the interactions. Another thing that was great was getting a theme for this season of our lives, our theme will be "Authentic." We will look at three different angles of this word and what it means for our walk with the Lord. 1 - That God desires to have an authentic relationship with us, 2 - That He desires authentic changes in our lives, and 3 - That He desires for us to have authentic relationships with others. I am really excited to dive into this theme and understand more of God's character. It is VERY refreshing to understand that God has created all of us differently and that He deals with us differently. It makes me feel so special to understand that He doesn't just respond to my needs in the same way He responds to all other believers, but that He listens and responds according to who I am, and how He has design me.
On another note, my brother (Claude) is getting married on the 29th of April, which is right around the corner, and my brother (Vitor), who still lives in Brazil, will come with his wife (Marina) on the 21st and stay until the wedding. This is really exciting because I never get to see him and I miss him a lot, he is very joyful and refreshing to be around. This time can become very hectic for my family and I just ask that you remember us in your prayers and that this will be a time of rest and joy for all of us and not an overwhelming and frustrating time. The opportunity for my immediate family to come together (which makes up eight of us, six kids plus my parents) is very unique and has only happened twice in the last 14 years!! Most people have family reunions with their ENTIRE families, we have family reunions with our immediate families, that's pretty funny! That's all folks, I hope you all enjoyed this brief update!


Left to Right:
Collin Setterberg, Me, Haley Devine
and Douglas Rose in front of a
fountain on the Radford Campus.
Haley will be my roomate in VA and
Collin will be my partner on the
Campus.