The Faithfulness of God

Sorry we haven't been writing lately! Things have been quite busy here. But we have a lot to share on God's faithfulness in the last month! And we will share something that we need some help on too.

Firstly, as we updated before, this month we have been travelling to different ministries. The last update was when we were in Phitsanulok and about to travel to Chiang Rai to help the DTS Orientation Camp there. Well...on the way to Chiang Rai we had some car troubles. Our car has been having problems for awhile now and we have been waiting for God's timing in order to fix it. Just after leaving Phitsanulok, our car broke down and wouldn't start. Guess where it broke down? Right across the road from a car shop. The people at the car shop told us that we would need to wait until the next day for it to be finished, as they had to change a big (and expensive) part of the car. We prayed for 4 months already, to have enough money to fix the car. At this time, we had no money in our bank but had a car that couldn't be used again until it was fixed, so we prayed. Awhile before that time, a large amount of money was given to us as a donation. We kept it with Karis' parents in case of an emergency. This money happened to be exactly 14,500 baht. After praying, we decided to use this money to pay for the car. The next day after the car broke down, the owner of the shop who fixed it quoted his price: 14,500 baht. God provided the money before it happened, and the EXACT amount that we needed.

Another "nutella and crunchy peanut butter" story (although this time, with Ferrero Rocher chocolate): The day before my (Karis') birthday, I was in 7-Eleven and saw a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates. We all know how expensive these chocolates are...but SO good! However, I was able to control myself because of our finances. That night, a friend gave me a birthday present, and when I opened it up, guess what it was? A box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates!

Now for the story that we are asking help for...

The YWAM 50th Anniversary (conference) is coming up. The founders of YWAM, Loren and Darlene Cunningham, will be there. It will also be an amazing opportunity to meet with YWAMers from all over the place, and to build relationships and networks. Up until Sunday night (24th Jan) we were planning to go. But on Sunday as we prayed and looked at our budget again, we realised that the expenses for this month were too much from all the travel, and so we needed to give this opportunity back to God. So with some struggle we decided not to go and started to make plans to go back to Ubon this week. But we also asked God that if it was His will for us to go, could He show us by sending someone to talk to us or help us the next day (Monday 25th - before we went back to Ubon!!!). In the afternoon of Monday 25th, after making some plans to go back to Ubon, a friend of ours came up to me and said that she had been praying all day and felt like she wanted to help us by paying our house rent so that we could use our money for the house rent to pay for the conference. She said that she felt God didn't want us to miss out on what He had planned for us to experience at the conference. Wow! So that night we prayed again, and we felt like God was giving back to us what we gave to Him. The YWAM Chiang Rai base (which we are staying at this week before going to Chiang Mai for the conference) has also agreed to help us and give us a discount on how much we pay to stay here this week. At the moment, we have about 50% of what we need in order to get to the conference. But we believe if it really is God's will, we will have the 100% by 2nd February (when we pay the conference fees and hotel. We have chosen a cheap hotel about 1km away from the conference venue). So we would like to put this out to everyone and ask for people to pray for us about this. If you pray for us and for God's provision, and then feel like God wants to use you, please let us know. If you don't feel like this is the right time to give, don't worry - your prayers are what is needed the most. We believe that God will provide some way! He always does.

Thankyou so much for reading our update. Praise God for His unfailing love and faithfulness in our lives - and in yours too.

God bless you all!

First Update of 2010

Hey everyone,

Happy New Year!

We hope you are all well in this new year and have some good new year resolutions to fill :)

We have been on the road since 26^th December, first travelling 6-7 hours to a place called Nakhon Sawan (about 4 hours out of Bangkok). We came to this place to run a Christmas program, but we ended up staying for about 4 nights to help with some other things that came up, and to have a time of resting too, which was nice! After this, we went to Bangkok and stayed at Karis’ family’s house for a week and a half. This was also a relaxing time for us, and a chance to spend some time together without the distractions of ministry. During this time, we also had a chance to go to a lovely beach wedding, the first wedding we’ve been to since our own.

Now, we are between Bangkok and Chiang Rai (in a place called Phitsanulok). We left Bangkok on the 11^th and drove here to visit some good friends of ours who we will hopefully be working together with in the future. Tomorrow (Wednesday 13^th) we (along with these friends of ours) will travel to Chiang Rai to plan, set up, and help run the Orientation camp for the next DTS. If nothing else comes up, we are planning to leave Chiang Rai towards the end of January, take our friends back to Phitsanulok and then go home to Ubon, where Ice and Pedro are at the moment.

In the last month, Ice and Pedro have been helping out in the YWAM Ubon internet café and being “discipled” by one of our friends to get them ready for their DTS. Our leader has talked to a Thai DTS in Khon Kaen (another province in Isaan) and we will find out more information soon (about school fees and whether Ice and Pedro will be able to learn there). Please pray for Ice and Pedro at the moment, while we are away, because it is hard for these two teenage boys to live a godly life when we’re not there to help guide them. We are looking forward to getting back home, spending some time with them and helping them through the trials that have come up in the last month, but until then we need to trust them into God’s hands. Please pray. Thank you to those of you back in Ubon who have been helping to take care of Ice and Pedro while we are away.

We also want to thank everyone who has been supporting us in the last month through prayer, financial needs, and encouragement. We have grown a lot in the last month by seeing God’s faithfulness come through for us, to the point of Him providing money even for diesel for our car to do all this travelling. It has been an important time for us in our relationship to rest and spend time with just the two of us, plus an important time for us to prepare our ministry by the relationships we have been able to build in the last month. We believe that our trip to Chiang Rai in these next 2 weeks will also be an important time for us to build more relationships, serve YWAM Chiang Rai, and catch up with some of our old friends :)

So once again, thank you. Everything we do here would not be possible without our God and the support of our “backbone” – YOU and everyone else at the other end of this email :)

May God bless you all and give you a fresh start to the Year 2010.