March Madness in Michigan

Hello everyone,

We are back from our trip and we are happy to be what feels like home in Columbus MI. There were many churches and individuals who were interested in partnering with our ministry and we feel extremely blessed by God’s faithfulness to us. Our official percentage of support has not been raised much, but we have so many new people considering us that we have felt so blessed at this stage of our ministry.

Joshua actually did quite well in traveling. He usually just slept for about the first 6 hours in the car, and after that, who wouldn’t be fussy about being in the car for that long, so we could hardly blame him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We got to celebrate the 84th birthday of our really good friend, Dell Schultze, (pictured left). It seemed like a good idea to light 84 candles at one time, but it took us about 10 minutes to light them and by the time he blew them out there was a nice layer of wax on the cake! We just scraped it off and enjoyed celebrating the life of a man who has continued to serve the Lord and is an example to all of us, young and old alike.

 

 

 

 

We also got to spend some time visiting with the Pastor and his wife of the Korean church at which I used to be a youth pastor. The Pastor’s daughter, Angie (right) was a very faithful student who came to youth group and was very involved while we were there.

 

 

 

 

Our trip to South Carolina was filled with visiting people who said they wanted to see us but really just wanted to see Joshua. 🙂 Joshua’s great-grandparents (left). And Miss Erline (right) who hosted our wedding on her property in 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

Everywhere we went, people wanted to hold Joshua and get their picture taken, I guess there is something about a baby.

 

 

 

 

 

Anyways, we are happy to be home and are continuing to build our team of partners in order to be able to take the gospel to the least reached people’s of Asia Pacific.

We are required to meet a specific amount of “stability” in our bank account in order to qualify for a student visa to allow us to stay in the country for 1 year. We were content to apply for the “undesirable” and more expensive tourist visa if we did not meet the requirements, but in the matter of a couple of weeks we met the requirements for the student visa. We are blown away to see how God has provided so abundantly for us even in the midst of our doubts!

We are starting to feel that going to the field this July is a lot more of a reality now rather than just a dream. We will be starting the visa process towards the end of March, which is a lot more work than we were expecting. We need to be at 75% by the end of March to begin that process. We do believe that at this point we are above 50% of the requirement, and are now waiting on individuals and churches to get back with us. Then we will be able to know better what our official percentage is at.

We were asked by an individual to make a list of the needs that we have in order to move to Asia Pacific this July. We have begun to formulate a list of those things, such as: luggage, malaria meds, etc…  If you would like to know what some of the specific things we are needing to purchase before leaving, please let us know.

Prayer Requests:

• Our relationship with God should be our #1 priority. We can’t let other things become idols in our lives, or in other words, let other things take our affections. It is not accurate to say: “watching movies is inherently evil”, it is not even accurate to say: “too much video games is bad for you.” In reality, when things have taken over the affections of our hearts, that is bad for us. 1 John 5:21, the last verse in the book of 1 John, tells us: “Little children, guard yourselves from idols.” 1 Peter 2:11 says: “Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to keep away from fleshly desires that do battle against the soul.” Both Peter and John warn us to guard ourselves from putting our affections on earthly things. We need to constantly be coming to the One who “bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might cease from sinning and live for righteousness.” We live this out in our lives by seeking Him in His Word, seeking His will for our life, and praying to Him as if the conversation is never really over. If you would like to know of a way to pray for us, this is our number one prayer request, and we pray this for many of our partners as well.
• Our second prayer request is that we will stay close as a family. That we will love each other as God commands us to in His Word, and that we will raise Joshua in truth and in love. Our family is probably our most important dynamic in communicating Christ to lost people before we can communicate to them in their own language.
• We will eventually be working with a team of people and the teamwork and harmony that we will have will be almost as important as the family aspect mentioned above. This is our third prayer request.
• Finally, we would pray that God begins working in the hearts of the future people group we will be serving in. We do not know the details of which one yet, but God does, and we would ask Him to be preparing the hearts of those people for the Gospel.

Thank you all for your support of us and our ministry. We hope that you find our update encouraging in how great and awesome God is, and how He is continuing to work in our lives despite our weakness and doubts.