Adam & Melissa Gibson
ABWE
January 2023
Happy Thanksgiving:
Hello from Portugal! We have been very busy these past two
months. It is exciting to see how God continues to work in
amazing ways. For the past two months we have had a number of
new visitors at church. It was great for us to be able to get
together with all of the ABWE missionaries from Portugal and
Spain for our annual Thanksgiving retreat. It is always a
wonderful time of listening to God’s word being preached and be
able to spend time with other missionaries we rarely get to see.
While we miss spending Thanksgiving in the States we very much
enjoy spending it with our missionary families and eating a nontraditional
Thanksgiving dinner, complete with baked fish, curry
and grilled slices of turkey.
Merry Christmas:
We pray that you had a wonderful Christmas as we did.
December was packed full with Christmas parties, get togethers
and the beginning of the month we did something new for us.
We had the opportunity to attend something called a SHARE Conference for three days in Spain. It is a
conference geared towards home schoolers and helping with children’s education. It was a wonderful time of meeting other families and spending time with professionals in the education world. The conference was not extremely convenient to go to but was such a huge help and a great encouragement for us. The kids all had their own classes they were involved with while we were in meetings and all day. It was great for the kids to be around so many other American kids who are also living in other countries. They had a wonderful time and made some great friends.
About 6 months ago we had a guy start coming to the church who is named Azeem and is from Pakistan.
This past month we have met other Pakistani men who have started attending IBEC (the church), as well.
We had the privilege of having them over a few weeks ago in our home for lunch after church. It was a
great time to get to know them as they did not even know each other. We are excited to see how God
continues to bring people to us from all over the world, some of them are believers and some we are
praying will become believers.
December brought floods to Portugal! If you google Lisbon flood 2022 you will be able to see images,
videos and other things related to this. We are only 10 minutes outside Lisbon and our area received lot’s
of rain as well. Thankfully we did not receive any damage as our area is called Colinas, which means hills,
so the water moved away from us! We did discover that when it rains hard our garage which is 2 floors
underground, begins to leak! Thankfully it is not bad but it does not help since it is where we store our
summer clothes and park our car. But God is good and we are so thankful that it was not worse like it was
in Lisbon.
Happy New Year:
We are excited for this new year and what God has in store for the church we are in as well as our lives. This year we are continuing to trust God for a new church building. We have been at max capacity for well over a year and we desperately need a larger space to meet. On a normal Sunday there are maybe 3 or 4 seats in the very front row that are available. While we are very excited about this we also are concerned that there are people who would show up and not come in because they do not want to sit in front, of course no one wants to sit in the very front, haha. But we ask that you would pray with us about our building situation. If you would like to give towards this need please mark your gift as “Portugal 4×4” on your check or online.
We trust God will provide in His timing and in His way. God is faithful!
We are also planning our furlough to start the end of 2023. We are praying for a place to stay as well as transportation while Stateside. Please pray with us as we work out all the details and for the increase in support that we need since having our fourth child.
We are so thankful for your prayers and support! We cannot thank you enough.