Away From Home

We may be a few weeks late, but Happy New Year! We celebrated the start of 2023 during our partnership development trip, which wraps up in about a week. We wanted to share some highlights from our trip and what God is doing in our lives. 

We arrived in Pennsylvania for Christmas, and we have been here since then. We have been meeting with people, giving presentations, sharing at churches, and reconnecting with everyone here who supports our ministry. In order to serve at Ethnos360 Training (ETR), we have a team of ministry partners who support us in a variety of ways (prayer, financial support, hospitality, and encouragement). After two and a half years serving at ETR, it was time for us to come update people on our lives and seek to grow our ministry team.  

Each Sunday, we visit a different partnering church and give an update. Each week is a little different—maybe a luncheon, maybe a Sunday night ice cream social (yum!), or possibly Nick gets to preach. What amazes us is the hospitality shown week after week to our family. We have been so blessed to be prayed over, encouraged, hosted for meals, given gifts, and shown so MUCH love! Thank you to everyone who has connected with us during this trip.

During the weeks, we have continued to meet up with people and share at church events. I (Kathy) am homeschooling Naomi, and we are loving that time together! Nick has been creating our presentations, preparing for sermons, and keeping up with our meetings and schedules. It is a big change of routine since he usually works outdoors or on maintenance projects, but our family is thankful for all the work he’s done on this trip! We have two more Sundays before we head home to Ethnos360 Training in Missouri.

One passage that comes to mind when we think of God’s provision during this trip is 1 Peter 4:9-10. It says, “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.”God has grown our understanding of hospitality through YOU! We are staying at a fully furnished missions apartment, and it has been a great place to rest and recharge as a family between events. We have experienced incredible hospitality and generosity over and over again. God is good—meeting our needs before we even ask! Thank you to everyone who has been part of that.

Prayer Requests

• Pray for our family. The girls are tired and miss home. It feels like “home” here to Nick and I, so pray for us as we say our goodbyes to family and friends before we head out. 
• Pray for continued growth in our ministry partner team, specifically financially. Pray that God will provide the remaining monthly financial need to bring our support level up. We were below 60% before our trip, and we are now between 67-70%, which is a huge praise! Let us know if you want more information about joining our monthly ministry partnership team.
• Pray for those learning about unreached people groups for the first time. We have had amazing opportunities to share about missions this month. Many listening to our presentations did not realize that there are still people groups without a written language and without the Bible! Pray that God stirs up laborers who desire to reach the unreached. 

In a week, we will start packing and get ready to head to Missouri. We have mixed emotions as we prepare to leave a place we once called “home” to return to our current one. No matter what, we take hope in what we know about our eternal dwelling place.

“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

1 Corinthians 5:1

We will update once we arrive in Missouri and get settled back to our ministries at Ethnos360 Training. Let us know how we can pray for you, and please stay in touch!