Warm Advent greetings from Spain. We trust and pray that this email finds you well.
As
we reach the end of a year of incredible change in our lives and
ministry, we want to thank you for your prayers and goodwill messages
over the past months. As you know, at the end of September we run our
last ever retreat at Los Olivos. Somehow, every retreat this year has
felt like the last one in the life of the centre, since it has involved
farewells for many of our regular guests and some new ones. Everything
has happened so fast, from putting the retreat centre on the market in
early 2018, to selling in the early Summer, to moving out in October to a
new hometown, Benalmádena, that we feel we've been running a marathon
for months... In all these things, we have experienced God's presence
and gentle guiding, and feel both tremendously blessed and excited about
what the future will bring.
We
are looking forward to new things next year. Los Olivos Retreats - our
new venture - will run two amazing programmes in 2019, in Cordoba and
Malaga, which will take Los Olivos on the road. Guy will continue
working for Keytree Spain, with regular trips to the Madrid office, and
Daniel will continue lecturing Church History at the Madrid Faculty of
Theology. He will also start his new role in charge of
internationalization in early 2019.
In
this season of waiting with expectation, we're mindful of all the
challenging things going on around us. The political crises in Africa
continue to bring hundreds of sub-Saharan African migrants to our
coastlines every week, a heartbreaking humanitarian drama, which impells
us to act and live more generously. We also continue to wrestle with
the uncertainties connected with Brexit for ourselves, as a mixed
nationality couple, and for our ministry here. We continue to hope and
pray that the new year will bring a new season of change in our world,
so that the vision set out in Mary's song (the Magnificat), may be
fulfilled.
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