Hey!!! Happy new year guys!!!!
Christmas just finished and this year is running like crazy, I can´t believe we are in the middle of January!
Just when ministries´ affairs take you to tiredness, and from tiredness to disappointment, from unexpected places and from unexpected people come messages like this one:
“Fausto I want to give you thanks for everything you’ve don that has influenced my life! Dude you have been more than a blessing to me, you have been a living example of a good leader who has a true and honest heart for the youth!!! Man, for all that, I admire you and will always do!! Thank you so much for your prayers! God is moving in such a crazy way here. He has been revealing life issues to me and I have grown like never before!!! The Lord has called me to Indonesia and Ethiopia to reach out!!!
I love you so much man!! You keep shining Him, OK man!!!
Love you,
Josh A.K.A. (the true gringo at El Círculo Juvenil)”
Josh is one of the guys in El Circulo who is in training at Australia to go to Indonesia and Ethiopia as a missionary. Who would have dreamed about something like this a few years ago when we were just a youth group? God is amazing!!! Please, understand that I’m not letting you read a part of Joshua´s e-mail just so you can see the way God is working through FAUSTO, blablabla… no way!!!! You will never hear something like faustoministries.com or Fausto Liriano Ministries… The work we are doing here is team work and God is the essential part of this team (“For we are God’s fellow workers;” 1 Cor. 3:9). But I want you to share our joy that God is using Dominican young people to impact the world with the Word.

Last week we finished 24-7, a prayer chain of 24 hours for 7 days. What should I say? It was amazing!!! Even being a crazy week, the prayer chain of 168 hours is causing a great impact in the spiritual world. We were even in the news once again. While we were in the batey (a poor neighborhood of mostly Haitian workers) giving shoes to 250 kids, a newspaper called Clave published a note on El Círculo. You can download the article here, so you could learn Spanish (hehehehehe!! Just kidding!!!), or just see the pictures.

What else is new?
- Our LET´S BUY A BUILDING campaign is working. We are watching properties and reaching the negotiation phase soon. Some of you are going to help rebuilding El Circulo’s sanctuary next summer… Swe.. eet!

- We got our first communion service of the year in Hard Rock Cafe - Santo Domingo. It was a wonderful time of praise and worship, great food, prayer, and community. You can see some pictures in the left.

- We are beginning training workshops for the leaders in El Circulo that will last a full year. There are a lot of expectations and I know this is going to be helpful for us as a growing church.

- Noe and I are doing great! One of our goals this year is to support other young couples in ministry, so please pray for that.

Some prayer requests:
1. For all activities in the month on January, specifically for the Cinplugg, so that God may be glorified fully.
2. For us (Fausto and Noelia), so that God may grant wisdom, courage and faith, that we be obedient to His calling.
3. For all this year’s goals.
4. For all new leaders that are being raised up in El Círculo.
5. Thanks to God for his provision.

God has blessed us greatly, and beginning this year we are once again thankful that you have been a part of this blessing in prayer, and some even financially, yet all have been an important part and are here observing and being with us. Thanks so much!!!!
Fausto & Noelia Liriano

No, it is not your eyes! Yes, it is a new look for the Somethings website! I thought it was time for an upgrade in the look of the webpage, so this is a step towards that. You’ll notice some gradual changes over the next few weeks as I fine tune the page. So stay tuned and enjoy the new look.

As I drink coffee (the best coffee in the world, Santo Domingo!) and I listen to Noelia playing her guitar in the balcony of our tiny apartment, I find myself in the middle of yet another small storm in our country, this time named Olga (it turned out that it wasn´t that small). It’s been only a month and a half since the country was beaten by Noel, a storm that took us totally by surprise. The frightening thing about this is that the morning of that storm, I was taking some friends to the airport at 5am, and the waves were crashing right into the highway… But how would I have figured that something like this was going on? Usually there are storm alerts, but this time our weather authorities did not deliver solid news about the magnitude of this storm. After its crossing, it left destruction and even death; 155 communities were left without communication, more than 29,448 people in government shelters, 71,549 people evacuated from their homes, 85 deceased and 45 disappeared, plus more than 20,000 affected homes.

In El Círculo we were helping the communities of Sabana Perdida and Guaricano, and together with other churches we helped communities in Barahona, delivering clothes, food, blankets, towels, cleaning goods, etc.. In the face of such catastrophe I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised by two things:

1. The whole country was thrown into action-mode to help out. It was as if we were a large house where everyone understood that repairs were needed, as if all of us were a family and it was time to go out and help those brothers and sisters that were suffering.

2. The Dominican church fulfilled its role: by giving up their church buildings as shelters, by sharing their offerings to those in need, by making their homes available to those who needed a place to sleep. There were also sad stories about Christians helping. For example, one pastor went out in a boat in search of people who needed to be rescued, but unfortunately crashed into a house and drowned.

You can imagine that when it rains, even when whole communities are being evacuated, the bitter taste of destruction is still being felt by all Dominicans.

Aside from the storms and catastrophes (not only here, but also in other parts of the world), we have continued our normal course. Noelia came back home from Argentina, so if you’re reading this, you’ll know that I survived. We’ve been married now for one year and three months, and our relationship is every day being strengthened, as we get to know each other more and more. For El Círculo, this December and January will be two of the busiest months we’ve had in a while, including the fact that we are moving forward with our “LET’S BUY A BUILDING” campaign. We will also be completely in the streets: a medicine run in Cotuí (where we have a Community Center), in January we’ll be distributing boxes from Samaritan Purse among the children of Cotuí and of the Robert Reid Cabral Children’s Hospital. Each of the small groups is involved in some form of mission: a Christmas dinner at the leprosy center, shoes for the children of the batey, and in February we’ll have the CinPlugg, which is an acoustic concert where we’ll premiere a band of strings (violins, violas and cellos). How healthy is it to be so busy?

We will begin our new year at peace, in prayer: 24-7 is a week where we’ll have a prayer chain for 168 hours (24 hours during 7 days), each hour we’ll have boys and girls praying for our country, for you, for El Círculo, for the Lord’s Church in the Dominican Republic.

Some prayer requests:

1. For all activities during the month of December and January, specifically for 24-7 and for the CinPlugg, so that God may be glorified fully.
2. For us (Fausto and Noelia), so that God may grant us wisdom, courage, and faith, that we may be obedient to His calling.
3. For next year’s goals.
4. For the new leadership that is being raised up in El Círculo.
5. Thanks for His provision.

God has blessed us greatly, and as we end this year. we would like to thank all of you who have been a part of this blessing in prayer, and some of you even financially, but all of you have some part in this and in one way or another have been here observing us and being with us. To all of you… Thank you!!!

Fausto & Noelia Liriano

We will be having our monthly lunch after church, since it is the first Sunday of December (and Christmas is soon to follow!). If you want to know the details, click the event over to the right of this post.

Hope to see you there!

This is for you Windows XP users out there. If you’ve got a PC running Windows XP that is completely up-to-date, you have SP2 (Service Pack 2) installed on your computer. These Service Packs are just large updates to your Windows XP software. Well, Windows is planning on releasing one more Service Pack update called Service Pack 3 (go figure!). However this update is not due to release just yet, but you can get your hands on it today.

If you visit this website, the author of the page has some instructions on how you can get a copy of this new update today.

I just installed it on my own computer, and it definitely has a different look to it. I’m not sure what features it is supposed to have, but I’ll be exploring for sure. I don’t see a huge change yet, but there are supposed to be “1073 fixes” in the update. If anyone can find any more information on what is in SP3, let me know.

Many of us are in school, studying to become teachers, engineers, musicians, physical therapists, etc. And it is inevitable that somewhere along the way we have to defy sleep and study through the night to get a project done or study for a test. But one of the dilemmas of pulling an “All-Nighter” is finding the proper nutrition to carry us through the night.

Now, Denny’s offers a solution. From Monday to Friday, between 10pm and 5am, you can head over to Denny’s, get 20% off your check, and bring your laptop (’cause they have free WiFi). So when Starbuck’s closes over there on Bellflower, next to the Lowe’s, you can walk over to Denny’s and continue studying.

There’s nothing like eating the Grand Slam and studying for MoBio, or Linguistics, or whatever class keeps you up at night.

If you picked up an Operation Christmas Child box over the last few weeks at church, those boxes are due this next Sunday. So make sure to fill ‘em with all sorts of goodies and bring them to church on Sunday and you’ll be making a child very happy at Christmas time.

If you didn’t pick up a box at church over the last few weeks, don’t worry, you can always use a regular shoebox to put things in. You might want to check out the OCC website to see what kind of things they’re looking for to go in the boxes, but not having the OCC box shouldn’t stop you from being generous. I myself did not grab a box, but I’m gonna go to Big Lots this week and fill up a shoebox and you should too.

I was listening to a Rob Bell message this morning, and he actually showed the video of Paul Pots during his message. I’ve seen the video before, but hearing it again this morning jogged my memory, and so I thought I’d share it with ya’ll.

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the “America’s Got Talent” tv show on NBC, but there is British version of this show as well (not so surprising). Both, coincidentally, are produced by Simon Cowell, so you kinda get the idea behind the show.

In the last season of the British show, there was a man who tried out for the show by the name of Paul Pots — a car phone salesman from Wales who sings Opera. Most of us are accustomed to Simon Cowell ripping performers and telling them how utterly horrible they are for trying to sing, but when Paul Pots got up to audition, he left Simon Cowell speechless. So if you haven’t seen the videos on YouTube, I put the audition clip below, and you can check out all the other performances by Paul Pots as the competition went on (he ended up winning the whole thing). But it’s just an amazing story on so many different levels and even though I’m not a big fan of opera, his singing will give you “goosepimples”, as the Brits say.

I don’t know how often you all check out the Parkcrest website, but during the next couple months always seems to be the busiest time for outreach events. The Christmas season always brings with it a lot of ways to get involved in the community and bring joy to people at a time that can be rough for a lot of families.

So if you go to the Parkcrest site you’ll see on the bottom of the page there is a whole list of things that you can get involved in. One of the items on that list is “Jackets for Jesus” — something our small group did last year. It was awesome to get a bunch of jackets and take it down to Skid Row to pass out to people, because it can get really really cold during the winter for the people living out on the street, so this is a small way to help keep people warm during the winter. And even if you can’t go help pass out jackets, donating your own jackets is an awesome thing, too.

There are many other things that you can do during this time of year — so get with it. Parkcrest has a wealth of opportunities to impact the community.

Ever feel like you’re between a rock and a hard place?