We hope you are all enjoying the many wonderful things about this time of year --- milder weather, trees and flowers blooming, the promise and hope that comes from knowing that Jesus died and rose again!
We are getting to enjoy the outdoors and celebrate the Easter season in some new and exciting ways this year. In the past two months we have made magnificent strides with the transformation of the lot beside our house. Not only have we had a great place for our family to enjoy spending warm Spring days, but we also have a place to invite our neighbors into for some special Easter events. This Friday night we will be showing an animated Life of Jesus movie in the lot, and Sunday we will have an Easter egg hunt for the kids. When we look back a few years ago to the frustration and trash-pit that the lot was, it's amazing to have a space that we can enjoy and share.
Another area of "new life" that I (Elizabeth) am getting to enjoy and participate in is my first two births as a doula. It has been hard but satisfying work. I left one birth feeling physically exhausted but emotionally exhilarated, and another where my muscles were just fine, but my heart ached horribly. Both times though, it just felt like such an honor and privilege to get to serve these women and be a part this meaningful event in their lives. It's felt like such a fit for my gifts and passions that I kind of wonder how I got this far in life without finding this path. It's just another example of how God has shaped us and our ministry by the experience of becoming parents. He's shaped and changed us as people and missionaries by brining children into our family, and for that we thank Him!
Speaking of which, there is another "new life" development ... much to our surprise, we found out we are expecting Varaso baby #3 in October! This has suspended or side-tracked some of the plans that we had (I will have to take some months off from serving as a doula, and I won't be running the Broad Street Run this Spring as planned!) but since the initial shock has worn off, the excitement has taken over. We are trusting that this new child will be a delight to our family, a builder of the Kingdom, and that God will meet our needs and limitations with his abundant provision.
We had also planned and expected for Frank to be able to start a course of treatment for Hepatitis C this Spring, however the treatment is not safe with my being pregnant. It has been about a 5 year process of being passed around and waiting for treatment to be covered, so as you can imagine, having to delay is difficult to accept. The treatment can be really hard on your body, so we have even wondered and prayed about trusting for healing or seeking alternative treatments. Would you please pray with us for this -- that during this delay, God would maintain or even heal Frank's body, and that He would give us wisdom and peace about a treatment course in due time?
While we have had to adjust some plans and expectations in light of this new baby, we are also experience the delight of plans that have worked out sooner and better than we had expected. We figured that preparing the lot for use would be a summer-long endeavor, but instead we can already sink our toes into green grass. We hoped that eventually we would have an opportunity and resources to send Selah to preschool for a couple of half-days a week, but because we couldn't find a good option, we gave up looking and figured we would re-visit it in the fall. Instead, two good friends have just started a preschool at a local church, and Selah attended her first day there yesterday. She loves it! God has just been caring for us and giving us contentment and peace. It's a good place to be!
With so much groundwork being laid in this areas of new ministry -- the literal groundwork that Frank has been doing in the lot, and my doula training - we are looking forward to all that God is going to build upon this foundation. We are praying that there will be more people coming to join us in this ministry, and that with a lot of the foundational busy-work behind us, there will be more and more chances for more and more personal ministry.
Please continue to pray for us, that God would energize and encourage us as we face challenges so much bigger than ourselves. We want to be filled with hope and faith, focusing on what He is able to do, not limiting Him by what we are capable of. Pray for our neighbors, that their hearts would be soft and open to who Jesus is and what He wants to give them. Pray for our kids to thrive here, to have greater faith and do greater things that we have and have done.
And please enjoy these great pictures of our family and our neighbors enjoying our plot of green grass!
Thank you for you prayers, encouragement, love and financial support that keeps us here!
Love and blessings,
Frank, Elizabeth, Selah, Callum and baby-on-the-way!
Wow, how wonderful it is to be home, sweet home! After traveling to Jamaica, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and back, being gone 37 out of 39 nights, we have settled in and are so thankful to be in our own house and in our own neighborhood. After so much time on the road this past year, having absolutely no travel plans in the immediate future is a relief!
We had such a fruitful time during our trip to Georgia. Each family and individual that we spent time with gave us such encouragement and joy. We spent two days at the Adventures in Missions headquarters where were able to get many details settled, have some valuable face time with leaders who oversee us and just receive such absolute and overwhelming confirmation from God that our move to AIM is exactly what He had in mind for us. We even saw how God orchestrated my departure from AIM 2 1/2 years ago and our return to AIM at this time perfectly with changes and growth going on within our family and within AIM as an organization.
If you had asked us near the end of last year, we would have figured on a much faster timeline as far as when we would want to start to build a team of long-term co-laborers and receive teams for Family Mission Trips. We thought we were ready to jump right in .... "A team of interns by March! A Family Mission Trip over Spring Break! Let's go!" After our time in Georgia, we see how God is setting up a much more deliberate and drawn out process that we think will be healthy for our family, will provide a solid foundation for our ministry, will give us something really excellent to offer people who come to partner with us, and will help preserve us for the long-run. Since our plans to have a time of equipping last year ended up being a season of "detox," we are now finding ourselves making equipping and growth a main priority.
Part of this plan involves developing our own ministry skills and resources so that we are really ready to plug other long-term folks into what we are doing, and part of it means really understanding what is entailed in putting together an excellent model for Family Mission Trips here. A really obvious yet profound suggestion was made to us by a pastor who we met with in Georgia -- "Why don't you take YOUR family on a Family Mission trip? Take your leader hats off, see how the rock-stars of Family Mission trips do it?" Frank has never had the opportunity to just be a participant on a mission trip, and I have had to fill some sort of leader role on every trip since I was 19. We thought this was an awesome piece of advice, and were floored when this pastor followed it up by saying, "And in fact, I commit $1000 toward the cost of such a trip to make it easier for you to go!" Wow!!
Please pray for this process - for us to find the right trip to be a part of, to decide if it's best to take an AIM trip or experience how another organization does Family Trips, and to get all that we can out of an opportunity to see what it's like to go to an unfamiliar place and serve God together as a family. Hand-in-hand with this plan to get some experience and insight about how other Family Trips are run well, we have several families from Georgia who are planning to come together and serve on our first Philadelphia Family Mission Trip as a sort of pilot project. This gives us the chance to lead our first Family Mission Trip here with a group of people who we have loving and trusting relationships with - what a privilege! We are praying for the timing to be just right -- to go and serve as a family, and to be prepared to receive this collection of families at at time not to near and not too far away in the future.
Apart from developing great Family Mission Trips, we are on track to develop our own ministry skills and resources too. Now, this is one area where we HAVE ended up on the fast track! I (Elizabeth) had planned as some point in the first half of the year to attend a Doula training workshop to begin my certification. As it turns out I'm attending a weekend training workshop in just a few days, have been hurried to complete two full books of my required reading beforehand, and will already be released to start attending births toward certification next week!
While I've been reading every spare minute, Frank has been using the unseasonably nice weather to tackle a project on the outside of our house, as well as working in the lot and preparing it for some major transformation this Spring & Summer. We are so used to operating as a family that when the chance to go on a date arises, we often don't know what to do with ourselves. Once, several months ago, we found ourselves at the grocery store buying butter on sale when a surprise date opportunity arose! Last week a friend got off work early and sent us out the door to have some time together while she kept the kids. We found ourselves at Lowe's picking out paint to transform our dirty front door into something more colorful and inviting. I know, so romantic! This warm weather has given Frank the chance to attack the front door & windows with some much needed caulk and to share time with our neighbors as he's out there. Keeping our 130 year old home functional and welcoming as well as transforming the lot for ministry use have required some hard work and skill, a challenge that Frank has risen to like a champ!
Lest I paint some idyllic picture, a Norman Rockwell version of a inner city missionary family if you will, let me tell you, it's not easy, very often not very pretty, and we fail on a regular basis. It's unbelievably challenging to roll work, ministry and family into one ball. It's awesome to not have to send my husband away from 9-5 each day and to have such equal partnership when it comes to parenting. It's great that we both get to pursue our gifts and passions and use them to show people how much Jesus loves them. It's incredible to have Selah insist on the way to the grocery store that we buy enough to share with our neighbors. But it's messy. Since we don't clock in or clock out, there are times when we can't get a break, and times when feel like we are being lazy. We can't go home and complain to our spouse about the co-worker who is too controlling or who doesn't see it how we do, because we ARE that co-worker! When we do have to work out our differences, we are doing so with the person who we often feel free to give our worst to. Our sin and shortcomings are magnified when we see how they play our in family and ministry roles -- a place ripe for God's glory, but also, like I said, MESSY!
We are desperate for your prayers and for the Lord's help from moment to moment as we live/work this life/job. Please pray for us as we try to discover a rhythm that will allow us to do this all well, and to glorify God not just in our gifts but also in our foolishness and weakness. We know the mess that we are, and wonder how those who don't know the hope of Jesus even stand a chance. Pray that we can enjoy God's grace in our lives, for ourselves and for the sake of people He wants to show Himself to through us.
We'd love to send you a prayer card so that you can put it somewhere that will remind you to pray for us (and to show off our cute kids and pretty new apple-green door!). We're planning to do a one-time mass mailing this month so that we can send out these prayer cards and also let people know what our needs are for this next season. If you didn't do so last month, will you send a reply to this to let us know that you are getting these updates, and confirm your address so that we can send this one-time mailing out?
Thanks for partnering with us, for praying for us, for believing in us, for making this life/work possible!
