If you are in Virginia, come to Jessica’s parents house (click here for a map) on Saturday, December 3rd to experience an Irish Christmas in Roanoke! You’ll get a taste of some Irish Christmas traditions as well as the opportunity to see how God is building His church on the Emerald Isle. Come and go anytime between 2-5pm, the house will be open. Hope to see you there!

For our last youth club before we leave for the USA for a while, we had a special “Live Cluedo” night. Cluedo is the same game as Clue in the USA, and we changed it up to make a live-action version where there are no turns and everyone races each other to be the first one to solve the crime. It turned out brilliantly, especially thanks to our great cast of suspects:

Can you figure out who they are supposed to be?

Last night we got home from several days of Munster Christian Camp’s “Inter” camp for teens in the first half of secondary school (US translation: Jr High + High School freshmen). The camp went well, despite some changes in plans… like our main speaker’s wife having a baby halfway through! It must have been hard to come back to camp and stay focused for those last couple of talks, but he did, and the students paid good attention. Camp is exciting anyway, but this one will be hard to top!

David was pretty popular at camp.

Last weekend Jess and some other ladies from church, along with help from the teen girls, put on a mother/daughter evening around the theme of modesty. It was a follow up to the night of (true) beauty they had done before, and included a fashion show to display how you can be modest and trendy at the same time. Not only was it a fun night for mums and daughters to share, but it also gave them the opportunity to chat about serious things in a safe environment. In other news, Seth was invited to speak at a meeting of the Christian Union at Cork Institute of Technology on Tuesday. It was encouraging for him to see and share with a group of students taking a stand and living out what they believe in a place where doing that is definitely counter-cultural.

Sunday afternoon Seth went to a pre-camp meeting for a youth camp we’ll be helping with at the end of the month. There are three camps for different age groups, and we’re helping with the middle one which has a long waiting list of people trying to get in! The speaker is a fellow Crossworlder whose wife is due to have a baby a few days after camp… so is this a warm up to get used to living with no sleep?

Since school has started, our weekends have included youth club on Friday evenings in our house (amazingly, the boys go to bed and sleep fine even with a house full of noisy people downstairs) then on Saturday night we’ve combined some of the Bible studies we were doing in the summer into one college-ager study on Ephesians. This last weekend we switched the two around and had youth club on Saturday in the building where our church meets so that we’d have room to host the youth club from Tramore, which is near Waterford about an hour to the east of us. We had great fun together and heard testimonies from members of both groups. It’s great to hear how God is working in other people and cities near us!