I just wanted to give a quick update about the new skate facility in Cobán. In a previous post titled, “It is Finished” I made the mistake of posting before going inside and seeing it with my own eyes. When I went in a few minutes after posting, I thought oh no because the water and electricity wasn’t even hooked up.

Now it is truly ready and yesterday the skate mission team helped us get the ramps inside the new facility. Today we will have the grand opening with music, prizes, contests etc. On Thursday, we will hold a skater Bible study for the first time in the new building. A skate session will follow and in the evening we will serve them hot dogs and show them the Spanish version of Livin it, an evangelistic film produced by the Palau Association that focuses on Skateboarding and BMX bike stunts. We are stoked about the eighteen decisions that were made for Christ on Sunday and now is the time to follow up with them to get them a base knowledge of the Word of God. Please continue to keep this ministry in your prayers.

The ramps are in & ready to go!

Check out this video summary of the first three days of our 2010 Skate Missions Team!

I just wanted to give you a quick update today about the building in Coban, Guatemala that is now our Extreme Sports Ministry base; it is finished! The construction phase has been completed and as you can see in the photos below, it’s time to move some skate ramps and equipment in! We appreciate those of you who have been praying for and/or financially supporting this effort. We believe this building will be used mightily to reach at risk kids for Christ! We’d love to hear your comments, when you get the chance.

Extreme sports building is ready in coban, Guatemala

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Our Ministry Trailer

For those of you who read our last post and were wondering how we were going to transport our portable ramps after they get here, this post is for you. A few weeks back, a pastor of a new congregation in Virginia inquired about our upcoming needs. It was communicated to him that we will be receiving our portable ramps in the upcoming months, and we’ll need a way to carry them around to different events. Shortly thereafter, we found a used trailer for sale from a missionary in Guatemala City and the church purchased it for our extreme sports ministry. Praise the Lord!

One of the six portable ramps

We are excited to announce that six portable ramps will soon be a part of our equipment for our Extreme Sports Ministry based in Coban, Guatemala. God is opening up doors so that we will be able to hold mobile skate sessions in different cities in Guatemala as well as other countries in Central America. We are currently in the process of purchasing the used ramps with the proceeds from a 2009 fundraiser. This will allow us the opportunity to have an even bigger impact in communities where extreme sports are rapidly growing in popularity. We hope to have them here before our skate mission team comes in July, so that we can use the ramps to do demos in local schools. It has been quite a challenge to find a way to get them to Guatemala. We have tried to get them here in the back of vehicles that are being driven down, to no avail. We also have tried to find someone who is already sending a container by barge to allow us to use one pallet’s worth of space. Please pray for us to find an efficient cost effective way for us to get these ramps shipped to Guatemala.

Maribel Rice with team members in Costa Rica

It was with lots of fears and nervousness that I left my country this time, since it was my first time flying alone. When I arrived in Costa Rica, I didn’t know how blessed I would be for two weeks. During the first week God showed me that sometimes you only have to be quiet and HE will do the rest. I spent the first fives days with a missionary family and I enjoyed the time that we shared together. I also worked with a group that had arrived at the Bible seminary where they live and serve. I enjoyed working in construction with the group so much that I was tempted to work with them instead of the medical team because I am not a doctor or a translator.

When the medical group arrived, I already knew about half of them even though I hadn’t spent much time with them before. The other half of the group were complete strangers, but in a short time I saw that they were wonderful people. In the beginning I doubted that I was where God wanted me, but that’s when I realized that sometimes, we ourselves may feel out of place and in reality we are exactly where God wants us. We worked in many different places with lots of different people that are really not much different from us. They were people that not only needed medicine, they needed to be loved and not just any love; it’s only the never changing love of God that softens the hardest of hearts! So my first mission trip outside of Guatemala, has filled my life with blessings because I was able to serve and God allowed me to get to know many awesome people!

Five16 Magazine Issue No. 7

God is still opening doors in unique ways for our ministry. One of the most recent has been having a magazine article written and featured in the current issue of Five16 Magazine. Our good friend Paul Burgett was the author of the article and contacted the magazine about the possibility of having it published by them. Five16 Magazine is an online extreme sports magazine that offers a Christian perspective on the extreme sports scene and music culture, but is still able to captivate the interest of non-believers as well. I totally recommend this magazine and you can sign up for a 100% free subscription at the Fize16 Magazine Link. The actual magazine’s pages are setup on a Flash viewer, so your internet connection needs to be of a decent speed. Our article is titled, “To Fall Like a Cat and can be found on pages 34-41, of the current issue. We hope you get a chance to check it out and please give us your feedback about it. We want to say a special word of thanks to Paul Burgett for writing it and to magazine editor Chad Armel for including it in this month’s issue; God bless you guys.

Habacuc & Dave were my roommates at the 09 Christian Skate ministry Conference.

Our ministry will be collecting financial contributions to help with disaster aid relief in Chile from this morning’s huge earthquake. Our good friend Habacuc Diaz Ramos is a missionary in Santiago Chile, just 200 miles northeast of the epicenter from the jolt that registered 8.8 on the richter scale. All donations received for this humanitarian aid effort will be forwarded to Habacuc for dispersal in hart hit areas. As always your gifts are tax-deductible, and remember it’s times like these when we all need to join together to show the love of Christ to those who desperately need it. Contact Us, for more info.

This is just some video footage of some of our regular skaters at our February 23rd skate session  in Coban, Guatemala. We only used three ramps in this outreach because it was during the week with about twenty skaters in all. The types of ramps that you will see here are a quarter pipe,  a kicker and a fun box. Let us know what you think!

Catherine-singing in the rain 01/31/2010

I just want to take a few minutes and give God the praise that HE deserves for something that, even the non-believers are talking about at our skate outreach in Coban, Guatemala. I want to start out by saying that I have lived and served as a full-time missionary in Guatemala since November of 2001, and have seen God completely take over and intervene in many different situations. Occasionally HE has pushed a rain cloud away, until we finish an outdoor event but nothing equals how HE has orchestrated this year’s rainy season; in terms of our outdoor activities with the local skaters. Coban is located in the edge of a tropical rainforest, so light drizzle with high humidity and early morning fog is a given here. However, there is also a very evident rainy season here between the months of November to February where heavy, all-day rains are expected a couple times a week.

I returned from last year’s Christian skate ministry conference on November the third, all fired up and refocused to continue leading these local, at-risk kids in a lifestyle of following Jesus on a daily basis. We held an average of three weekly, outdoor skate activities for the months of November and December of 2009. We are now in February of 2010 people, and we have yet to have our Masonite covered skateboarding ramps even drizzled on! I am not saying that it hasn’t rained. On days in between the skate activities, it has rained for hours and we have even had several steady two to three day torrential rains. We have held approximately thirty outdoor activities in the last four months including skate sessions, Bible studies and Sunday afternoon events that are four hours long. Even yesterday as I was driving to the school for our 3:00PM Skater Bible Study, I started shaking my head as I hit a patch of light rain. I was noticing the the thickness of the dark clouds covering Coban like a blanket. I wasn’t shaking me head out of doubt; it was because I already knew that God was going to do it, once again! Jose, a regular skater that comes from Santa Cruz about fifteen minutes away, almost got off the bus because it was raining so hard. It rained at my house and reportedly all around the city of Coban. At the school where we were pouring our hearts out to rejected kids, it never rained a drop! As I was finishing up teaching the Bible study, I told them that it doesn’t matter who has turned their backs towards them and rejected them because God loves every one of them so much and you want to know how I know that? I asked them to think about how many times we have held outdoor activities since the beginning of November and not once have we been rained on. Ivan, a hardcore Emo kid in his twenties said, “hey, you know that’s right; we live in Coban; can you believe that?” YES I CAN, PRAISE THE LORD!