Greetings friends & family! It’s been awhile! We apologize for the lack of communication since our school started. We have been SUPER busy working with students and preparing for outreach. We will be leaving for Bontoc, Philippines on Sept. 7th. We have a team of 23 adults and children. Shane is the official “outreach leader” with myself and 2 other staff supporting him. Staffing the CDTS (Crossroads Discipleship Training School) has been a big growing experience for us. There have been many days of pure joy and many days of struggle. We have people from all walks of life in our school and they all come with different kinds of baggage or preconceived ideas of what this school would look like for them. We both have 2 students that we meet with on a weekly basis and help disciple through the school. We also lead small groups once a week with the students to build community and discuss the week’s topic. Our weekends are filled with outreach prep (learning skits, preparing songs, sharing testimonies, etc) and trying to get as much rest in as we can. We were blessed to spend time with Shane’s Mom in July and my parents in August. We have found a great church only 5 minutes from the base and the kids really like their children’s program. We are planning to staff CDTS again in 2012 and have some big decisions that we have to make that we would love some prayers on. We love you all and are so thankful for your love and support. We will most likely see you Michiganders in December!!
6-26-10
Greetings Friends and Family!
We have finished week one of our Crossroads YWAM training and it was great! We are settled in and have made a lot of new friends, especially E & A. They LOVE it here. We can’t begin to describe how thankful we are that they enjoy being here and have made friends so quickly. Thank you for the prayers that concerned this specific request. God is good!
The day before we left, we had a little going away party at Jen’s parents house. It was a neat way to say goodbye to our friends all at once. We received many cards of encouragement and gifts of financial support. A big thank you to everyone who came and for the emotional and financial support – they are both needed. We left around 4am on Monday, June 14th and arrived at the YWAM Salem base around 1pm on Friday, June 18th. We spent the weekend settling into our room and exploring the campus.
Classes started this past Monday with the week being focused on team building. It was a lot of fun to get to know all of the other families in our class. We seem to have a great group of people. We are a very multi-cultural class; we have families from India, Mexico, Korea, and a family from Hawaii. We have a few single parents, 2 retired couples, several young families, and a few single women. There are 12 children in our Crossroads class and they range in age from almost 2 to 14.
Our schedule is quite busy as they have us going from 7am to 5pm and occasionally have evening activities for us as well. Our children have their own “school” in the mornings while we are in class and so far both of our children are enjoying it. In the afternoons, Shane and I have “work duty” from 3-5 pm and during that time the kids are in “day care”. It’s just a big play time so they think it’s great. Our evenings have been spent watching the kids play on the playground or trying to finish our homework (yes – they’ve already assigned us a book to read in 4 days and a bunch of journaling). It gets a little tricky trying to work on homework in the same room your children are sleeping in. Everyone says that after a few weeks we’ll develop a routine and the schedule won’t seem so overwhelming. We’re hoping it’s true!
We have really felt a lot of confirmation that this is where God wants us to be. We are SO excited to learn more about God and to know Him in a way that we have never experienced. We are praying that God will take this time to shape us and mold us into His image and that we will be ruined for the ordinary.
Thank you for joining us on this journey. We are excited to share with you all that God is doing in our lives and in the lives around us. We would LOVE to hear from you, so our new mailing address and email address are posted on the left side of this newsletter. Your words of encouragement mean a lot to us. Also, if you haven’t checked out our blog, you should! We’ve posted pictures and few updates from this past week on there!
May 23, 2010
This newsletter is LONG overdue… but our excuse is good. We have been incredibly busy because our HOUSE HAS SOLD. We are so thankful that our prayers have been answered. The day that Shane put in his 6-week notice at work, was the same day that we received an offer on our home. We are scheduled to close on our house this Friday, May 28th. Thank you so much for all of your prayers about this specific request. As you can imagine, this is a huge relief for us financially. While we did not make a profit, we no longer have the financial responsibility of it, and for that, we are thankful.
We have been living with Jen’s parents for the past month or so and things have been going very well. This past weekend we moved all of our furniture and bigger items to their house and some to Shane’s parent’s house. It’s weird to see the house empty – Jen has lived in this house since she was in 2nd grade. There are definitely a lot of memories in this house, but we feel a peace about moving on. It’s always hard to let go of the past, but we are very excited to move forward with this journey God is leading our family on.
Another exciting item to note is a tremendously successful garage sale. Jen and her Mom held a garage sale for 2 days at her parent’s house in Allendale and raised over $900. It was incredible! Would you believe that we did not have any furniture or item priced over $50? It was a nice way to purge ourselves of “junk” and to make some money for our YWAM fund. Jen’s parents were incredibly generous to donate the proceeds of their items in the garage sale to our YWAM fund as well.
Speaking of our YWAM fund, we have had some incredibly generous donations. Since we are not aware of everyone who has donated, we want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who has given to our YWAM fund. We are so thankful and humbled at how God is providing for us through you.
We are preparing to leave for Salem, Oregon on Monday, June 14th. It’s exciting and a little stressful to think that we leave in 3 weeks. Goodbyes are always hard (especially for grandparents who are having to say goodbye to their only grandkids) so we ask for your prayer that we will all have strength, patience, and peace during the next few weeks. Emotions are starting to run high at times, especially with the children as their lives are beginning to change and they don’t understand everything going on. Please remember A and E in your prayers. They are both very tender-hearted and we want to make sure that we are sensitive to their needs and do not forget them in our busyness these next three weeks.
April 27, 2010
Greetings Friends and Family!
We wanted to send out another newsletter to inform everyone on a big decision that has been made and to let you know a little more about the training we are jumping into so you know how to better pray for us.
After a lot of prayer and consideration, we have chosen to take our Crossroads Discipleship Training (CDTS) at the Salem, Oregon YWAM base. We have been told that all 6 of the YWAM bases in the U.S. are great, but we feel that the Salem base will fit our family’s desire to grow together in God the best. None of us have been to Oregon, but we have heard from many people that it is absolutely gorgeous. Our training begins June 21, 2010 (yes – you heard us correctly… it’s just a little over 8 weeks away). We are not terribly excited about the 37 hour car ride to Salem, but we are praying the Lord will give us good driving weather, roads clear of construction (Ha!), and patience with our children.
Our time at YWAM will consist of 5 total months of training. The first 3 months will be spent in the lecture phase studying topics like: Hearing the Voice of God, God's Heart for the Nations, The Nature and Character of God, Forgiveness, Spiritual Warfare, Evangelism, Cross-Cultural Missions, Worship, etc. After the lecture phase of training (around Sept. 12th), we will spend 2 months in Thailand and a short stint in Burma for our outreach training. The outreach phase is a time for us to share the good news of Jesus Christ with people who have never heard! We will be immersed in a cross cultural setting with opportunities to put into practice what we’ve learned in the lecture phase.
Our home has not sold yet, but we have recently lowered the price and are praying it will sell soon. We have had a LOT of activity on it, so we are just waiting for the Lord to bring the right buyer. We are planning to leave for our training regardless as to whether our home sells or not. We were hoping (and still are) that our house would have sold before we left, but we have a total peace about leaving for our training before it sells. We are basically living at the Jen’s parents place and have been slowly moving things from our home to theirs. We are planning to leave all of our big furniture in the house if it does not sell before we leave for showing purposes.
