At the beginning of this month, we gave stage 2 evaluations to a family and a single lady who have been here studying for a year now. They all made great progress, and now they are moving on to a different island to finish their national language and culture studies and then join a ministry. The single lady (who also happens to be our close family friend, Amy, whom we’ve known for many years) left on the 20th, and the family will be leaving early next week. The goodbyes are one of the harder parts of our orienting ministry, but it’s bittersweet because we get the privilege of watching new missionaries come to the field not knowing any of the language or culture and leave a year later having made friends and being well on their way to fluency in the language and culture. All 3 of these missionaries also happened to be going to the island where we used to serve. That adds an extra level of excitement for us to see them get involved in meeting needs that we’ve seen firsthand.
We’d like to ask for your prayers regarding our support level, which over the past year or so has dropped to 62% of what is recommended for our family and ministry expenses. Our biggest expense right now is tuition for the kids’ schooling, which is essential in order to free DJ and I to put in the amount of time we do in our jobs, as well as being vital for meeting our kids’ specific educational needs. Another expense is yearly trips that I (Jennifer) need to make to do language consulting or attend workshops and meetings related to my job. We are incredibly grateful for all of you who faithfully support us, and the last thing we want to do is put any guilt or pressure on you to increase your giving (since we know many of you are already giving sacrificially) or to give if the Lord doesn’t have you in a place where that is possible right now. What we would like to see is for our network of prayer partners and potential supporters to expand. If you know of anyone who would be interested in receiving these updates (a snail mail version is also available 2-3 times a year for those who don’t have e-mail) or connect with us via facebook (Jennifer Wimberley Searcy) or on our blog (https://blogs.ethnos360.org/dj-searcy/), please feel free to put us in touch with them. There’s no obligation, of course, and we never pressure anyone for funds. It’s two more years till our next home assignment when we can connect with people in person, so any help you can give us in getting in touch with people between now and then will be a great blessing.
For the past couple days DJ has been busy moving all the furniture and appliances from one of our rental houses into storage. Since we don’t have very many families here right now, we are turning one of our empty houses back over to the owner. Please keep praying with us for the Lord to raise up more co-laborers to reach out to more people groups with the Gospel in this needy part of the world.
Recently DJ’s dad, his sister Rachel, and Amy (our good friend who has been here for a year) blessed us with some gifts so we were able to spend 3 days in a homestay at the beach with them. The accommodations were simple and the roads in were challenging, but the beaches were beautiful and empty, and we had a wonderful time together. It had been over a year since we’d seen Dad. He was at the end of a trip from the US, Rachel was about to head back on home assignment, and Amy was about to move on to her new region. So it was really nice to have a few days together before we all went our separate ways.
Thanks so much for praying for us. We appreciate all of you, and your prayers are having an impact. God bless you!
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