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Sasha and Maria Silvia Rasmussen
Calle Alternativa ministry update.
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Greetings!
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Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years are moments in our year that cause us to be reflective. Maria Silvia and I have been looking over the last year, and even the last few months, and we're overcome with gratitude towards our faithful God and father. Here is an update of some of things we are thankful for in our life an ministry.
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 My God has Sworn
On November 12th at 8:55 in the morning, Isabella Rasmussen was born weighing 5.8 lbs, and measuring 18.9 inches. She is a healthy little girl, and Maria Silvia also recuperated quickly after giving birth. We know that many of you have prayed for us in our journey to have children and we want to thank you for your kindness and persistence in prayer. We are most thankful to our sovereign God, who has provided us with the desire of our hearts in his timing. Isabella means "My God has Sworn" and her name is a symbol to us of his faithfulness and goodness in all of his actions towards us. Although he would still be faithful and good if we hadn't been able to have children, Isabella is clearly a gift from his hands entrusted to us to steward and shepherd and we praise him and thank him for her.
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 College Girls Bible Study
Maria Silvia started a small group Bible study in our house with a group of eight girls from our college group. Two of them are new believers, and the purpose of the study was mostly to be able to disciple them, but it also served to help the other girls grow in their faith. She took them through "Setting Captives Free" by Beth Moore, called "Sea Libre" in Spanish. True to Argentine style the study was slated to be just an hour and a half, but always took at least three hours to work through together. It was a tremendous blessing both for the girls from our college group, and also for Maria Silvia to minister God's word to our students.
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 GritaGol 2012: The evangelistic soccer and volleyball tournament formerly known as "Cordoba Cup"
For the fourth consecutive year we held our city wide evangelistic soccer tournament. This year we had over 500 in attendance between students, parents/coaches and adults. We were bombarded by difficulties in the days leading up to the tournament. We were told to stop using the name "Cordoba Cup" two weeks before the tournament because of copyright issues with another tournament by the same name in our city, chances of rain for the day of the event were in the upper 60%, and we were around 5,000 pesos (about $1,000 USD) short of what we needed to pull the event off just two days before it started. But as always God blessed our efforts. We changed the name to "GritaGol" (Shout Goal!) and it didn't affect the signups at all. It was foggy and we had light rain right before the gospel presentation but somehow we were able to coax everybody outside to the stage area to hear the gospel presented, and as soon as we finished praying after the presentation the rain cleared up for the rest of the day. We were given a few donations, and we had more teams sign up than we had previously expected and so we ended up with a cash surplus. The most important victory of all however was that 43 teenagers and adults raised their hands expressing that they had placed their faith in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins! God worked in spite of or even through the many challenges that we faced.
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 Where no thief approaches... On October 27th, between our youth group and college meetings, Maria Silvia returned home shortly with one of our students to grab some condiments for a barbecue we were going to do with our small group. When she entered our house she saw our files strewn everywhere on the floor, our patio door and gate open, and our padlock broken. We had been robbed.
The thief seemed to know that we are always gone every Saturday between 6:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. because for most people in Argentina that is a time you're at home. This most likely means we were being watched at least to some extent, which of course is really creepy and disconcerting. The thief only stole cash, everything else was left except a small point-and-shoot camera (which unfortunately wasn't ours). We had a fair amount of cash on hand (around $3,500 USD) between our ministry funds which we had been saving through various fundraisers, and personal money.
At first it was pretty rough on us. More than having our money stolen, which didn't feel great either, it was the feeling of having our intimate space intruded on, and our family's safety threatened, especially three weeks before our baby was to be born. But after a few days we were able to see it in a different light. We praise God that we weren't home when it happened because that would have been much worse, and much more traumatic. We were reminded once again that we don't depend on money for our well being, but we depend on God who provides all of the things we need. Some of our lessons were more practical in nature. We will now keep cash on hand to an absolute minimum, and are planning on opening up a bank account here in Argentina with sub accounts to keep track of everything. We now have four padlocks on our patio door's gate and are looking into some other options for better security like alarms, covering our patio with iron bars, and a few trained tigers. Most of all, we will just do what we have been doing up until now, trusting that God is bigger than the evil circumstances of this world, and he is capable of protecting us, and that when we are involved in storing up treasures in heaven we need not worry about thieves.
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 What we've been up to in general:
Portable youth Center:
We've continued to put on our portable youth center for our neighborhood once every two months. It has become a neighborhood-wide activity attracting not only teenagers and college students but families and even the elderly. People seem to really enjoy the opportunity to connect with others from the neighborhood in a safe environment, and many feel like we've given the kids a space in the park that they didn't have before, where they can enjoy being a kid without the pressures to do drugs and get involved in things that aren't healthy for them. Through the youth center we were able to invite kids to GritaGol, and we've made friends with a catholic group in our neighborhood which gave us an opportunity to sit down and talk about the gospel with them one Sunday afternoon.
Student Day:
We celebrated student day with a big activity which had us running around downtown doing crazy stunts, a sort of car rally but on feet. It was a great time to celebrate our kids, and call them to be students of Christ and his word.
Worship Ministry
Sasha has been placed as pastoral overseer of the worship ministry at Centro Crecer. Garret Gardner a college student from Colorado who had previously come down as an intern in our church and now is studying medicine here and ministering in the youth group and college ministry at our church. Through his leadership, and the efforts of the worship teams in both the youth group and the college group, we have seen much growth in the worship ministry in our church.
Sex Talk
We recently finished a series where we discussed the Biblical purposes of sex. Argentine youth are as saturated or even more saturated by the images and ideas of a sex crazed culture. Our kids were very receptive to God's word on the topic, and to learn that within God's boundaries in marriage their sexuality finds its greatest fulfillment.
Fundraisers
We have been working all year to slowly build up our youth fund through periodic and consistent fundraisers. In the summer we sold ice cream, and at church outings we sold Choripanes (Sausage Sandwich). We also recently held our annual youth celebration dinner. We thank the Lord that not all of that money was stolen since we had already deposited a good amount at the camp we will be using this year.
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GritaGol
The biggest victory were the lives who trusted in Christ, here are some photos of this years GritaGol.
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Isabella
She's the cutest little person on the planet. But don't take our word for it, see for yourself.
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Up and Coming
We will be writing another update soon the recount our camps, and our first missions trip as a college group!
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1234 Main Street, Awesomeville, MA · 555.555.5555
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