Two Months..... One to Go

Our last post was dated May 3rd and today is July 3rd. So indeed it has been two months since we posted about our acceptance to MTC. Life in the those two months has been very busy and full. Full of graduations, good-byes, packing, moving, unpacking, transition, change, adjustments, celebrations and fun.

On May 16th Kent and I graduated from New Tribes Bible Institute. Our two years there were so amazing and such a blessing to us. We learned so much about our heavenly Father, who we are in Christ and how that all works together to help us walk in the Spirit. It was hard to leave but we know, that just like everything else in life, it was time for us to move on to our next step of faith.

Grady also graduated from kindergarten in June. He had an amazing year at Paragon Academy.

As we prepared for his schooling last fall, we prayed that he would have a teacher that would meet his needs. God answered in a way that I could have never imagined. God placed him in Miss Craddock's classroom. She is an amazing teacher, who works hard everyday to meet the kids where they are at. Thank you Miss Craddock for everything you've done for our son.

After graduation we started to pack up and prepare to say good - bye our apartment....

Our beds.....

The Bible School.....

 

Our Green Letters Group....

 

Our Deans and the other marrieds in our class....

To the wonderful friends our kids had made....

 

And to our dear, dear friends who have walked with us through our good times and our bad. Who loved us through good decisions and our stupidity. Those friends that can loving tell you things that may hurt but only do it because they want to see you grow in Christ. We found some of those at NTBI. I'm so thankful I found it in Katie. She and her family are going on with WEC, so seeing her will be few and far between. Making these the hard good -byes.

 



During all those good-byes we packed our things,

 

 



And with the help of some of our amazing friends, moved it all down stairs on June 5th and then....

 



 with the help from my crazy family we loaded a box truck and moved to our "Summer Home" in Bluffton on June 6th.

 

When we returned to Bluffton we were able to move right into the Eicher Mission House. We are so blessed to be the first missionaries to live in Tim and Julie Eicher's mission house. It's amazing, and a little strange, to have our own space.

 

So we're adjusting to life here in Bluffton. We've been here for four weeks and have been enjoying....

 

Packages from supporters even though we are home in Bluffton,

 

Celebrating Grace's 4th Birthday with an amazing cake by my nephew Hunter made and enjoying it with both of our families.

We've been enjoying cousin time at the pool

And Lala's pond.

We've also celebrated our 13th Anniversary. Kent got me an amazing gift! We usually don't do gifts, but this one was very thoughtful. He got me Rasinets because that's the girl that he married. He got me Skittles because life got colorful when we had the kids. He got me tropical Mike and Ikes because the place we will one day call home will be tropical. Lastly, he got me a 3lb bag of Twizzlers because that's what we eat when we travel.... and from now on we'll be doing a lot of traveling.

I love my husband so much. No matter where our steps of faith may take us in the years to come, I know that God sent us to Bible School so we could learn about who we are in Christ, so that in turn I could fall more in love with the man that I married 13 years ago. Praise the Lord that He's never done working on us and our marriages.

In the mist of transitioning back to life in Bluffton, to Kent working a 8 to 5 job, to Grady being out of school, to being with family and friends, we've started to hit our Partnership Development very hard. We've had three meetings already and we plan to have six more before we leave in August. During these meetings we're explaining to people where we are in the training process of become missionaries with New Tribes Mission and inviting them to partner with us in this training. Please pray for us as we do this. It's new and strange but also how God designed it.

So we have one(ish) Month (5.5 weeks) to go before we'll leave for MTC. August 12th is our departure date. Right now in order to make that happen we still need people to partner with us. It's so strange, two years ago I would have been freaking out about the money and the need and how are we ever going to go and on and on and on. But now, well it's still a little scary but it's not up to me. I cannot force people to support us, I cannot beg them to give. We can simply tell them our story, tell them our need and rest. Rest in God, who brought us to this point and who will continue to carry on this good work on to completion.



We Got The Call!!!

What it takes to get "The Call"

• Two years of Bible School
• A reference from your Deans
• Completion of a pre-application
• A background check
• A medical evaluation
• A credit check
• Completion of a formal application, which takes 6 hours to complete
• 4 references
• And..... Waiting....

And then the call comes. We received our call from Dave while we were at Wayumi. He was excited to inform us that....

WE HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED TO THE MISSIONARY TRAINING CENTER (MTC)!!!!

So what does this mean, we will be moving to Missouri, in August to continue our missionary training. This past week we spent a week at Wayumi, which is a more in depth study of the work we will be doing on the field. The time we spent at Wayumi stirred a great deal of excitement in my heart for the training that we will receive at the MTC. Honestly, I cannot wait. I know it's going to be a lot different than it is at NTBI. However, for the moment I will bask in the joy that comes from thinking about out next step.

More of the Same

As I was thinking about this blog post and what I wanted to write about, or what I should write about, I realized that our life right now, on the outside, is pretty much the same as it has been for the past two years.

Our kids are growing...

 And are still cuter than ever!

 

Even in our Senior semester we have a lot of homework, which requires more effort when you're so close to the end.

 



 We are still enjoying having our friends over for supper and the occasional birthday party.

Our time spent with our small group studying Green Letters continues to be a real blessing to us. We decided to share a "Dare to Be Great" one Friday night after supper.

The missionaries here, whether their our teachers, deans, or men on PPD who continually fix things in our apartment, continue to encourage us and press us on in our walks with the Lord.

All these things are things that I've blogged about in the past. Making it appear on the surface that life has been the same for our two years here NTBI. But praise the Lord is it not! All of these things listed above are now done with a better understanding of God's word. Making it more clear in how we should be walking in our relationship with the Lord and then how that pours into other relationships in our lives.

I'll give you one example.... Last year we had many couples over for supper because I thought it was the right thing to do. We were always feeding someone or having some type of gathering. This year, well more like since I took Romans, we still have people over but my heart is different about it. As I understand more about walking in the spirit, I can begin to host people in my home in a way that brings glory to God, not to myself. I can begin to meet the needs of those walking through my door instead of wondering what praises people may be thinking of me for always having people over. At times, it can still be tiring having people over for supper, but it's a different kind of tired than last year. I now understand that God does desire for me to do these things but he wants me to be walking in the Spirit as I do them.

Please hear my heart that these things are written out of a gratefulness for the understand of the word that God has given me me. I now understand that anything I try to do on my own, apart from the Spirit, may not fail but has no value to my heavenly Father.

I'm thankful that as our lives look the same in the day to day that God isn't content to leave us where we are and is still working mightily in our lives to make us more like his Son.

In two weeks we will be getting a break from this "sameness." Our spring break is the week before Easter. We'll be traveling home to Bluffton for that time. We'd love to visit with you while we're home. As we move on in our next step of faith, we will leave the "sameness" of NTBI and start new at the Missionary Training Center in Missouri. We'd love to share about that or just have you over for cookies and coffee. So if you have a free night let us know. We do love to visit with you and know what God has been doing in your "sameness".

Our First ER Visit

On Monday, we were blessed enough to have our first Emergency Room visit with our children. We went to the ER as a family after we totaled our van, but that wasn't a real emergency. Monday was an emergency.

On our arrival home from school, Grady was taking off his coat, but his hands got caught in the sleeves. He tripped and wasn't able to catch himself. He caught the entire weight of his body on his chin. I thought he was ok until I saw the blood. We had our friend John, who is a nurse, look at it. His immediate response was that we take him to the ER.

Well, 6 stiches, 4 hours, 1 x-ray, lots of crying, then being brave, me almost passing out, and a round of watching bad cartoons later, we left the ER with Grady's chin all fixed up.

He did well and I'll be glad not to visit there again any time soon.

So what else have we been filling our time with beside ER visits?

• Classes at School: Public Speaking, Philippians, and 1st and 2nd Thessalonians
• Homework, both ours and Grady's
• Training our Children
• Spending time with our friends here, as we only have the rest of this semester with them
• Applying to the Mission Training Center, our plan is to go in August

Our classes this semester are focusing on the applications of Christian Life. Taking what we've learned about God and who we are and then applying all those truths to our lives and how we walk in those. So what does that practically mean for our walks:

• Choosing to walk in the Spirit in all areas of our lives, even those that bring the flesh out of us
• Remembering what God has done for us in the past and believing him that He'll be faithful with our future
• Remembering that God is faithful even when He works out differently than the way we would want him too
• That God requires us to train our children to be obedient and submit to authority

Oh dear friends, stand firm, persevere, walk worthy today that you'll be found blameless before your heavenly Father. As I watch my kids sort through things at the table, I'm reminded at how quickly life goes. God uses it to remind me to make the most of today. Press on. And in the moments when you fail, just like I do daily, remember who you are in Christ. And decide..... I'm going to be who God declares me to be. So often I fail, but am so thankful for the grace that God shows me daily.

Ok.... so these pictures are from our NTBI Christmas party. They don't really go with the rest of this post, however, I thought it needed more picutres so I added some.

The Everyday

Kent was graciously reminding me again today that it's been a really long time since we've done a post. Sometimes it's scary that people will forget where we're at and what we're doing. So this is just a post to bring you up to date on our everyday lives here at New Tribes Bible Institute.

We're currently in our second year of Bible school, and will graduate in May. After another summer in Bluffton, our plan is to go onto the Mission Training Center in Missouri, where we'll get more training for the work that we will do on the field.

We're once again enjoying this year of Bible School. It's such an amazing place to be discipled and grow in the Lord. Yet, we still live the day to day just as you do. So I thought I'd share some of those moments that we've had over the past two months.

My sister Bobbie, who is on home assignment from Africa, and her husband and three boys came to visit us. It was a blessing for them to visit us and see where we live.

Grace still enjoys dressing up and we enjoy seeing how silly she looks.

Grady is doing well in school, he's holding his third "Right On!" ticket. Incase you couldn't tell, he's pretty excited about it.

We celebrated Grady's 6th birthday. Last year his birthday was kind of a dud, so we wanted it to be a little more special this year. So we had a hot dog roast...

With the 10 boys from NTBI ...

We ate cake and played games....

Had Grandpa Rockwell drive all the way up from Bluffton to visit us and take us out to eat....

 

And then enjoyed a monster cake with Kent family. It was a great birthday. I can't believe he's 6!!

 

 We were blessed to have Bobbie watch all 9 cousins. So my brother and sister-in-law decided to have a night out. As you can see its always a little crazy when we get away from our kids!

We had spirit week here at NTBI for Tribal Cup, which we won. I dressed as a twin with my "NTBI" friend Jill. It's actually a little scary how much we look alike.

The kids also dressed up that week. Grace got her costume from Grammy and Grady just picked from one of the 15 that he has.

Here's a blessing we received last month. Each year, a small church here in Michigan collects enough food for all the married students that are attending NTBI. The food came at just the right time and has been such a blessing to us. Grady was super excited about it and wanted to help me put it all away.

I love matching Grace, something I never thought I'd do with my daughter. We have matching headbands on that one of my friend's daughter made for us. I know I'm partial, but I think Grace is the cutest little girl I know.

No matter how crazy life gets here, we always find time for friends. Josh, in the middle, and his wife, Brenda Lei, and their two girls will be leaving us soon. They will graduate in 3 weeks and then head home to Missouri. Their hope to leave for Belgium in July 2015. We love them dearly and will miss them a lot, but are so thankful that our friendship has been able to grow leaps and bounds over the last semester.

Christmas? Yes, Grady found the new little tree I got at Goodwill and so we had to put up all the Christmas decorations. It was a bit crazy but worth it. Grady was definitely the most excited!

Grace is growing so much. This is a puzzle that she's putting together for the third time. She was able to do it all by herself!

Grady and homework.... yes homework in kindergarten. Some days I do better with it than others. This is his little table that he works at, and usually has a cookie or something fun to eat while he works. I'm thankful that he doesn't seem to have a problem with school. It makes the evenings short, but it's what we have to do while we're here.

So that wraps it up. Behind the scenes of these pictures is homework, visitors, the loss of our close friend, Dot, extra trips home, more homework, our marriage, working with our kids through difficult times, and our van that overheated and may have a frozen engine putting it out of commission for good (Kent's working on it right now).

Life isn't a bed of roses, as I'm sure you're well aware. Wow, what a choice I have to seek God daily. Asking him to lead me in what he would have me to do just for that day. Trusting him because he's faithful. Relying on the Holy Spirit to convict me and support me moment by moment. Life is tough but I'm thankful I don't have to walk it alone. Thank you God for filtering my entire life through your hands.

Firsts - Take Two

Last September I did a post of some firsts here at NTBI. As I sat down to write this long over due blog, I realized that we've had many first again this school year. So once again I thought I'd share some first from this September.

Yes indeed, this may be my son's first selfie, he's taken many since.

Grace had her first day of child care without Grady. She's doing really well at it.

We of course had to take our first day of school picture. We started with Romans, Church History, and Family Relationships. God is using them all to really work us over, realizing our position in Christ, and shaping our understanding of living out a life that's walking in the Spirit.

Kent went to a Michigan game with a friend, so the kids and I went to our first dog show with my friend Brenda Lei and her kids. As you can see, we're not with the dogs in this picture. The kids enjoyed the dogs, but loved playing together more.

GRADY HAD HIS FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!!!! It's hard to believe that my Grady is 5. He's doing so well in school. We love his teacher, Miss Craddock. She's very good with him. Waking up early is the worst part of school, but we're trying to adjust. We miss him being home each day. We're always glad for our family time each night.

This really isn't a first of anything, but was taken on Grady's first day of
school. I really just love the picture.

Our first visitor was Lala, my mom. She came for a Saturday and took us out to breakfast and enjoyed the day with us. It was good to have her come.

We've been living in MI for a year now and have never visited a Lake. Now I should have learned from by orchard experience that "a Lake" in MI would not be like "a lake" in IN. The lakes here are like going to a park only with nice water that your kids can swim in. And the majority of them have a really large shallow area that the kids can play in, and then they also have a nice playground close to the beach. As you can see, it's a great time to get away from NTBI, allow the kids to play, and hang out with our friends.

Grady lost his first tooth on the second day of kindergarten. It was coming out and the tooth behind it is already grown in. It was hanging by a nerve, so I flipped it and it popped out. He put it under his pillow and I traded it for a dollar. The next morning at breakfast, Grady asked if I had just taken one of his dollars out of his penny bank and put it under this pillow, of which I told him no I had given him a new dollar.

Grady, Grace, and I got to ride our first Bluffton Street Fair ride together. Grady went last year with my mom, but this year we all went together. Kent's mom was kind enough to buy the kids bracelets so they could ride.... she was also kind enough to buy them balls to win fish..... so now our kids have their first pets, two goldfish named Fred and Ted.



At the street fair, Grady and Grace also got to ride their first real horses. They seemed to enjoy it.

Here they are all in one place!!!! Grady and Grace got to see Owen, Grahm, and Cole for the first time in 2 years. It was such a blessing.

And here I am with my two amazing sisters. We were able to enjoy church together for the first time in two years. I don't know how many times we'll get to do this but it was a blessing to be able to share this with my sisters on Bobbie's first Sunday back in the states. Oh, how I love my sisters and am so thankful for them.

 My birthday was last week, not my first one, and Kent sent me flowers in the mail. It was the first time I'd ever gotten flowers in the mail. It was pretty neat.

We were crazy and took our kids to their first Michigan game. Kent found cheap tickets and used his birthday money to buy us all tickets. Let's just say... it went, but we won't be taking them back any time soon. It probably didn't help that Michigan was terrible and lost yet again.

However, as always, they seemed to find their silly faces long enough for just one crazy pose.

Lastly, this morning, Grace told Kent she painted her nail. I was in the other room and didn't realize that she meant she really had painted her nails. She actually did a pretty good job and didn't get any on the carpet.

So there we are, five weeks into school and so many first. We've been very busy with school, Grady's school, SWP, homework, and everything in between. This semester has been more challenging to find time with our classmates. That's difficult for me, but something I have to accept and hope will be better after our Romans class.

In December, we will have another first, watching our friends Josh and Brenda Lei leave NTBI. I don't think about it much because it's just hard. Bobbie told me that a missionary in Africa told her that you have to play it hard till the end. There will be time for crying later. So that's what we're doing. Playing it hard till the end, with all our friends that we love so dearly.