{"id":27,"date":"2007-12-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-30T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-12-30T17:43:42","modified_gmt":"2007-12-30T22:43:42","slug":"endings-and-beginnings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/2007\/12\/30\/endings-and-beginnings\/","title":{"rendered":"Endings and Beginnings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--StartImportPhoto--><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/files\/2007\/12\/2324_29669.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-104\" style=\"margin-right: 10px;margin-bottom: 5px\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/files\/2007\/12\/2324_29669.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" \/><\/a><!--EndImportPhoto--><\/p>\n<p>&quot;Endings are for&nbsp;gratitude, beginnings are for faith&quot;&nbsp; &#8211;&nbsp; John Piper&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>We came across this quote recently and thought it applied well to our situation.&nbsp; On December 20, we officially completed our state-side training with New Tribes Mission!!!&nbsp; Looking back, four and a half years seems to have flown by.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"boldText-red\">Endings are for gratitude<\/span><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;d like to give you a few examples&nbsp;of how&nbsp;God has displayed&nbsp;His&nbsp;faithfulness to us throughout this time.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When we began Bible school in Michigan, we had no real direction as far as a field of service or even what type of involment in missions we would have.&nbsp; <strong>Now we are thoroughly convinced of the need for the Gospel to be taken to tribal people who have no access to God&#8217;s truth. We are heading to Papua New Guinea (PNG) to serve the Lord as tribal church planters.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>At the beginning of 2006 our support level was about 1% of what we need to get to PNG.&nbsp; <strong>Currently, we are at 20% of our recommended support!<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>As we were planning our return trip to PA from MO, we knew we had more things to haul than would fit in our van.&nbsp; The plan was to rent a small trailer to pull behind us.&nbsp; After figuring the cost and effort that would involve, we made a crazy decision &#8211; pare down our belongings and only take what would fit in or on top of our van!&nbsp; As we got closer to the day we were going to leave, we had more things than would fit.&nbsp; We were prepared to just leave some of it behind, but God graciously provided two couples who were also going through PA and offered to haul some boxes and odd-shaped items for us &#8211; like Luke&#8217;s red tricycle&nbsp;(<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ntm.org\/bart-allen\/5348\">click here&nbsp;if you haven&#8217;t read the story<\/a>).&nbsp; But we still had several boxes of books that wouldn&#8217;t fit.&nbsp; We decided that we would mail them.&nbsp; After packing everything in the van, saying goodbye to people and finishing up cleaning our apartment, we finally left about <strong>3 hours later than we had planned<\/strong>.&nbsp; We then stopped by the post office to mail our boxes.&nbsp; Bart got in line and right behind him was a friend from our Sunday School class.&nbsp; As Bart was about to pay for the boxes, our friend said &quot;put those on my bill&quot;.&nbsp; <strong>What a blessing!&nbsp; And we thought we were late!<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, as we look back on the end of this phase of training, we are filled with gratitude for all the Lord has taught us, for friendships that were formed, for the Lord&#8217;s provision and guidance, for the hard times that we experienced and for God&#8217;s amazing faithfulness.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"boldText-red\">Beginnings are for faith<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Now we are beginning a new phase &#8211; partnership development.<\/strong>&nbsp; That is NTM lingo for raising support.&nbsp; As the term implies, we are part of a team.&nbsp; The job of planting a church among tribal people is too big for one couple or even one team of missionaries.&nbsp; We won&#8217;t be able to do our part without people back home faithfully praying and giving.&nbsp; We&nbsp;are trusting&nbsp;that the Lord will continue to burden the hearts of individuals and churches to&nbsp;partner with us&nbsp;through prayer, financial gifts and encouragement.&nbsp;&nbsp; If you would like more information on partnering with us, please use the <em><span class=\"blueText\"><em>comments<\/em><\/span><\/em> link at the bottom of the page.<\/p>\n<p>We are not sure how to gauge when we might&nbsp;get to&nbsp;the 100% mark that we need to be at before going to PNG.&nbsp; However,`&nbsp;we are asking the Lord to provide <span class=\"boldText-red\">100% of our support in 2008<\/span> and then to get us&nbsp;to PNG&nbsp;by or before the <span class=\"boldText-red\">summer of 2009<\/span>.&nbsp; That still seems like a long way off!&nbsp; We know that the Lord could work and we might have our support in just a few months.&nbsp; But He also might want us to wait.<\/p>\n<p>So, with faith that the Lord&nbsp;will continue to direct our path, we embark on a new beginning.&nbsp; Bart will be working at our church as the custodian to help with our needs until our support is enough that we can live on.&nbsp; We will also be visiting churches to share with them the need for and the work of tribal church planting.&nbsp;&nbsp; Just as we are thankful for all the Lord did in 2007, <span class=\"redText\">we are excited to see what He will do in 2008!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A testimony to God&#8217;s faithfulness!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-27","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/bart-allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}