Amdu Anniversary

Our Christmas and New Year greetings come to you late this year, but for good reason. We wanted to include a video link in this update and just got word that it has been successfully uploaded. Great friends and coworkers of ours took part of their Christmas break to do some work on the internet for us so that we could get this out to you. Just click on this link to check out Amdu Anniversary. Christmastime holds extra-special meaning for us now as it marks our arrival in Amdu as a family. 12.12.2013 was our first anniversary and we had lots to celebrate this year. In our last update we mentioned how the Lord has brought us out of debt. We have financially “recovered” from the expense of transplanting our lives in Amdu. We are progressing well in our language learning and the Amdu way of living and thinking is becoming more familiar to us. Your specific prayers and generosity in these areas are incredibly significant. Thank you! Unfortunately, during this Christmas season we have seen the deaths of two more of our elderly Amdu friends. These dear people were house bound for quite some time and as far as we know they died with no understanding of what Jesus Christ accomplished in coming to this earth and dying as the Savior of the world. In the soul searching that comes with these experiences we keep coming back to the fact that learning this language is the most important thing we can do for the Amdu people since faith comes by hearing! Pray that we would spend all our minutes with this in mind. We have already hailed in the New Year and it started with a bang, even in Amdu. The teens were boisterous and got themselves into a bit of trouble. After waking everyone up they decided to get the bush knives out and started in on some extreme landscaping of the fruit trees and flowers around the village. New Year’s Day opened with the first village court case of 2014. There was a lot of yelling and a couple times it felt like things might escalate into a fight. Cool heads prevailed, thankfully, but the experience has peeled back another layer allowing us to see more of the need and struggle that is common place in the lives of the Amdu. We are praying, trusting the Holy Spirit who is using these circumstances to prepare our friends for the Good News. We pray that you have had a meaningful Christmas and are looking into the New Year with hope eternal. We pray that you will continue to see the Savior’s face in the moments of your days and are so thankful that you pray the same thing for us. Benjamin and Missy