The Ruiz Family
Serving the Lord in Tixtla de Guerrero, Mexico
March April 2023 Update
Dear Praying Friends,
I can hardly believe that two months just flew by! God has continued to show His faithfulness to us and pour out His blessings upon us. At the beginning of March, our family went to visit a national, missionary family that we support on the coast of Guerrero, about 5 hours from Tixtla, to help out with their family conference. It was a blessing to see the small work growing in this very hot, humid part of our state. My husband preached, Hannah, Grace, and I taught some of the children’s classes, and the girls sang. We enjoyed the fellowship with this family very much, besides eating fresh fish and visiting the beach before our trip home.
The first week of spring break, our church took around 40 teens to the yearly youth conference we attend in Cuernavaca. This was the first year that we have taken so many teens, plus our family and a few adult helpers. As my husband and I looked back and remembered that first conference when all of the teens fit in our bocho (volkwagen bug), we cannot cease to praise the Lord for His good hand upon our church. We have a solid group of young people with servants’ hearts. I praise the Lord for the great influence our teens are having on the world around them. They are among our most faithful, willing soul winners, plus a handful of sold-out adults. We did have a small incident on the way back. One of our older vans broke down. Since it was full of girls (except the driver and one young guy), the girls got to push for a while. Their spirits were high though, even when we got home many hours later and much more hot, tired, and hungry. (Lord willing, this van gets out of the shop this week… almost a month later.)
God put in my husbands’ heart to take the normal Tuesday mission team to spend the entire day visiting spiritual needy families in our church and praying for them. The team of around 25 people spent two consecutive Tuesdays, visiting home after home from 9 AM to 10 PM. May God receive ALL of the glory for what He did in many of those homes. Many of the circumstances are very personal, so I will not share details, but God glorified Himself, and we’ve seen more visitors, more people saved, baptized, and added to the church since then. Since we don’t want to stop the normal Tuesday mission work, Efra has decided to add a Wednesday prayer visitation group so that this ministry continue.
Our church has been growing. We literally outgrew our children’s classroom yesterday and met in the street in front of our house/church. We had around 65 kids in the 7-11 year old class, and Grace moved the 2-6 year old class into my old classroom with almost 30 preschoolers (which normally meet in our living room). My husband preached to around 100 adults and teenagers. We finished the service with 2 baptisms.
Please help us pray that we can continue our new building. We are tempted to move to the new property as is. It’s definitely far from finished, but there is a LOT of space, and that’s what we need. The kids’ classrooms have a roof and dirt floors. The adults would have to be outside under a tent-like structure. We are so grateful to those of you who month after month support us here. Your support is not in vain. God is blessing and growing His church. If any one of you could give a little extra this month, maybe we could get in a cement staircase to the roof, and use the roof for a temporary auditorium. (A special thank you to those who gave us some “extra” funds last month! May God bless you!)
Whether we get to our new property or not, we will continue faithfully here, rejoicing in God’s work in His people. Thank you for praying. Your prayers are being answered.
We would like to take a trip to California this coming August. My husband has a visa appointment on June 27. Please pray that he won’t have any trouble renewing his visa, and that we would be able to renew some of our children’s passports with as little red tape as possible.
Blessed to be a blessing,
Ruiz Family
(Efra & Laura, Samuel, Hannah, Grace, Lydia, Laura, Mark, Ruth, and Benji)
