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From September 27-October 6, 2016, three women from San Antonio Los Ranchos, El Salvador traveled to visit their partner church First Lutheran Church in Duluth.  Marcela Murcía shared these words during the worship service. See more photos on our Flickr site.

Let us give thanks to God for each day, for all of the gifts we receive from God, especially the solidarity that our brothers and sisters at First Lutheran in Duluth have shown us, for making it possible for us to come here expenses paid and spend time with you and have new experiences, and we also thank those who shared their homes with us.

We also give thanks to God for all of the difficult moments we have gone through because when we look back on them we see the presence of God in each one, when our problems have defeated us, sickness, absolute poverty, temptation, the suffering of the war; God has always been with us.   As time goes on, years later, these difficult moments seem like a dream to us, because when we see all the achievements we have reached, we can say with joy that God has been great to us.

In the life of a person, for it to be called a life, there have to be many ingredients. If not, then it cannot be called life.  These are some of the ingredients: sickness, hopelessness, doubts, exhaustion, work, disrespect.  In the end, many things that we think of as negative, but these things have to happen.  But there are also many wonderful things that happen like: health, work, food, joy, family, friendship, patience, strength, affection, solidarity, and above all, a lot of love.