Update

After a breakdown this morning, praying, a good talk with my sister, I rationally looked at our support levels.

I'm excited to announce that we're at 50% for our monthly support for everyday expenses!!!! We were at 0% just 4 days ago Woooo Hooooo!

Thanks for the prayers. We feel them.

Super excited. Looks like we're headed to MTC!

Going or Staying

Thursday, at a morning appointment, my morning prayer about wisdom was answered. We have been praying about presenting our need for partners as we continue on with our journey to bring the gospel to the unreached. It's been a busy summer for everyone, making it a little more difficult than we thought to share our needs with our family and friends. We knew we wanted to share our need but wasn't sure how.

Our need to bring the gospel to the unreached people groups.

 

 

 

    As I was talking with a friend this week about our need for monthly support, she kindly responded by tell me, "Well, we're going to support you monthly." I was blown away because they had already given us a one time gift and they had blessed us and supported us in other ways as well. It was at that point that I realized we do need to share where we are with our forming partners to come along side us as we continue our training for the mission field. I realized that there may be people that are wanting to give, but have not had the opportunity.

 

Opportunity to allow people to partner with us, making it possible for the gospel to be brought and shared for the 1st time with the people in Papua New Guinea.

 

Or the Philippines



Here is where we are in continuing on with the next step of our training....
August Payment              100%

Monthly School Payment 98%

Monthly Expenses 0%
(Monthly Expenses include groceries, phone, insurance, etc.) ~ We're praying for partners that will support us monthly to help off set the cost of living. We have an amount that we believe we can live at while at the MTC. We currently do not have monthly supporters to help off set the cost of living. If you have questions about this please feel free to ask us about this.




What does that mean for us moving forward in this training....
To be able to financially attend the Missionary Training Center in 2.5 weeks we need partners to join us in bringing the gospel to the unreached.

What does it look like for Partners to join with us....
This could happen several different ways. Our current partners have supported us by giving us a one time gift. Other partners are supporting us by sending us support monthly.

If you want how to partner with us....
Please contact us by email, Brenda.rockwell3@yahoo.com, by phone, 260-273-9152, or Facebook, KentandBrendaRockwell, to let us know you're interested in partnering with us. Then we can give you the proper information and paperwork to join with us for the important task of spreading of the gospel to the unreached.

   As I sit and write this, I have to rest in how God's going to work this out. We knew when we started at NTBI that we would continue to go to MTC. And now here we are. We've been praying since October that God would provide the people to partner with us to make our training at MTC a reality. We really believe that God's plan is for us to be there this fall. Now I simply have to do what I've been doing all summer after we communicate our need, wait to see how God moves people to respond.
  
Waiting to see how the unknown turns out is difficult, stressful, and exhausting. But it's where we are right now. By August 10th, we'd like to have 100% of our support so we can pack our things and leave Bluffton on August 12th. I'm ready for the unknown to be over with. Which brings a smile to my face because a new unknown will enter our lives as this one comes to a close. But that's ok. I'm ready for this one to come to a close, it's be a long journey.

If you've made it all the way to the end of this post, Thank you! Thank you for taking the time to read about our need and how others can partner with us to reach the unreached. It's pretty cut and dry.... either we go, because the support came in.... or we don't, because it didn't. Please be praying with us as we wait to see how God moves hearts and works this all out.

Ending Where is All Began

This past week we were blessed enough to enjoy a family vacation with Kent's family as a Christmas gift from Kent's mom. When we found out in December that we would be going to the UP of Michigan we had no idea what that looked like but we thought it would be an adventure, just like anything is with a 6 and 4 year old.

Well, Grace made sure the vacation started with adventure by dropping a 13lb bowling ball on her hand the Friday before we left. Her two fingers were smashed so hard that we had to go to the ER. Turns out she fractured them as well as smashing them and bursting one open. We left with instructions to NOT get them wet!! Great instructions as we head out for vacation.

So one of the amazing things about this vacation was being able to visit with so many of our friends along the way. On our way to the UP we stopped in Jackson, MI to say our last good-bye to the Godsey's. We will miss these crazy cats. 

 

Katie was able to barrow this van for the morning so that we could visit for just one hour. We're so thankful for the people that help us in small ways that allows us to do small things, that have a lasting value.

We randomly stopped to see the Nelson's so Kent could say good-bye. We're so thankful for the encouragement and teaching these two gave us during our time at NTBI and in our Green Letters group. So glad that they were willing to follow God's call for their lives even though it wasn't at 21, or even 32, for them.

So we finally made it to the UP. The first day we went to the beach and, yes.... Grace got her bandage wet. Thanks to Aunt Ashleigh we got it changed with a lot of screaming and some freaking out. Let's just say we didn't go swimming any more during the week.

We had fun all week but it was very tiring!!

The Children's Museum was awesome...

 The time with my husband was sweet...

And the memories were priceless!

 

We're so grateful that Kent's mom made this possible for us. 

We're quickly figuring out that as missionaries you make the most of every traveling trip that you take. So not only did we see friends on the way to the UP, we also met with people on the way home. We stayed in Jackson two extra nights so we could meet my sister who lives in Kalamzoo, our teacher and friends Butch and Pat, our MI church friends Jason and Michelle and then finish our visit with attending our MI church on Sunday.  

 

We stayed in guest house apt. 4 at NTBI. That's where our journey into missions with NTM started. We stayed in that same apartment when we visited with the McCormick's.  

 

 

 

Here we are two years later and moving onto our next phase of training. We leave Bluffton in 3.5 weeks. We have 4 partnership development nights left, one weekend getaway with my siblings, a talk at church, a birthday party for Grady, meeting with friends, a cousin day, and lots of memories to make in those last weeks.

 

Each day we get a little bit more excited, nervous, ready, and uncertain of what lies ahead for us. Some of our friends had something unexpected come up this past week as we're waiting to head to the MTC. They said "God's got this." That pretty much sums it up and where it has to rest as we wait for yet another transition in our lives. 

 

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.