It has been quite a week of reentering life at the Nozomi Project. It continues to be an exciting ride – in so many ways.
Yesterday morning I shared with our staff the verse Isaiah 43:19: “Behold, i am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” I do really believe that God is going to continue to do a new thing, and do things that only God can do if we trust him – like making amazing beautiful rivers in the desert. The image that came to my mind with this verse is that we are riding a horse, and if we let God lead the horse, and hold on tight, that we will have the gallop of our lifetime! But often our inclination is to not trust and to get off and try to lead the horse. T – R – O- U – B – L – E. A lot more fun to gallop and trust.

We came back to work on Tuesday and have had a few personnel setbacks. I do not want to go into details, but you can pray if you would for each of these: one of our staff called and said she will be out all week (personal issues), another called to share that her husband’s cancer has re-surfaced and he needs to be hospitalized (please please pray!) so she can’t come in for awhile as she needs to care for her little one; a third staff called and shared the untimely and tragic death of her father over the New Years (I can’t share details publicly but please please pray). All three of these are major setbacks for women who have already suffered greatly in the past year and a half.

Two women have been out with sick family members. Another staff Chi., came in today and was called to her son’s school when he sprained his ankle and had to go to the hospital with him. It has been a crazy week – we were expecting an over-crowded work room and instead it has felt pretty empty.

Today we celebrated the birthday of one of our newest staff, Emi. It was great to surprise her and see the tears!

It has been awesome to have Sandra McCormack working with us this week – face to face! She is our awesome web designer and is here until tomorrow. She and I have been working to get the website up with all of our individual pieces. Yeah! New progress. She has been such a gift to us.

Tomorrow we have a new woman coming in – the mom of Annie’s good friend here in second grade. Maybe another new staff soon as well. It is good for new staff to continue to trickle in – a chance to reinforce our values and to help things not to get too rigid. There are a few different possibilities we are praying about that could mean NP expanding.

There have also been some cool PR things happening. A few still in the early stages – I will share those if they continue to develop – but one that happened today — a fashion design blog run by two sisters called Nubry.com sponsored Nozomi Project and wrote an awesome article today, featuring our work and sponsoring a social network giveaway to put out the word about the project. You can sign up here or on Facebook. If you click like you are entered to win one of five of our necklaces!

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