Jabulani, Africa!

For years now I have loved Africa with a part of my heart that God seems to have reserved specifically for the people of that continent.  I've been fortunate enough to travel to the southern part of Africa for a short term mission trip and for a 5 month Discipleship Training School.  You know how sometimes you get an itch and you think that if you scratch it, it will go away?  Well, Africa has always been the opposite for me.  The more I scratch, the more it itches.

When Jake and I moved to Longview, we decided that we should attend a local church so we could have community more locally than our church in Milwaukie.  We walked into a local church, Father's House Church, and began talking with people there.  One of the men there was talking with Jake and after about 5-10 minutes of conversation he mentioned that the church was sending a group to Uganda for a short term trip.  I immediately perked up and my heart leapt.  I immediately ran over to the brochures, grabbed one, read, and started planning what I would need to pack!  I knew, knew, KNEW we had to go.  After a few weeks of prayer, Jake jumped on board with me and we have been taking care of the details ever since.

It's been 2 months since we initially heard about the trip and now we are only 4 days away from leaving.  We will be gone for 2 weeks and 2 days (including travel) and will be spending our time ministering in Arua and Yumbe, in the northwestern corner of Uganda.  We will be ministering to people in hospitals and prisons, we will be passing out water filters, playing soccer with the kids, and doing basically anything we can to build relationships and share the love of Jesus in the communities.

As I was driving down the road the other day, listening to some worship music, I thought back to the refugee church my DTS and I went to in Mozambique.  It was a church with refugees from Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, norther Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and on and on.  It is one of the most beautiful churches I have ever been to because the people there were so open to love Jesus and expressing it without reserve.  They danced, they sang, the shouted and all in praise of our King.  There is something so beautiful about so many African people and tribes that are expressive and free in ways that Americans tend to not be.

It's a beauty that words and pictures cannot express.  It's a beauty that only my heart and my spirit understand.  It's a beauty that reflects the heart of God.  And it's a beauty that is only a few days away.

Jabulani, Africa!  Rejoice!

We're baack!

This is a much delayed entry, but it’s been a crazy couple of months.  The good news is that we’re back in the States!!  It’s come so quickly and at the same time it feels like it’s taken forever.  The past 6 months have been like riding a roller coaster with a blindfold; you strap in thinking you know what’s coming, but you don’t know when the cars are going to go up or down, when there will be turns or whether to scream from excitement or to throw up.  There are so many things that we’ve learned about being married, being missionaries and being human.

Our last update was after our first 10 days of outreach.  After spending a couple days at the YWAM base in San Jose, we headed south to Panama.  We spent October 11^th – November 17^th in different parts of Panama reaching out to the indigenous people there.   

We started at a town called David.  Our ministry there was broad and we worked with a wide range of people.  We worked with different schools, doing programs for the students and cleaning up school grounds.  We visited a nursing home where we got to help entertain and feed the residents.  We visited a small village where the indigenous pick coffee, which by the way would be a ridiculously challenging job (more about this later).    They also, of course, took advantage of the fact that Jake was a mechanic and had him work on some of the YWAM cars. 

Visiting the village where people picked coffee was a huge eye opener for our group.  The people that pick coffee are looked upon as second class citizens.  Latinos refuse to do the work because it’s too difficult for the pay.  The indigenous pick coffee and are thus the lower class.  The coffee pickers live in what is best described as a multiplex (like duplexes lined up with about 8 “houses” joined together).  Each family lives in 1 room and that 1 room holds anywhere from 4-8 people.  Each person sleeps on a blanket on the floor and there are rarely blankets to cover them, which is challenging because it gets quite cold as coffee grows in the mountains.  Additionally, they don’t have a kitchen, but rather all the families share 1 kitchen.  Each day the coffee pickers will go out at around 6 am and pick coffee until about 4 pm.  During these 10 hours, they pick about 1 70 lb bag of coffee for which they receive $7 from the coffee wholesaler.  This wholesaler then sells the same bag for $21.  The children of coffee picking families do not receive an education as it is too important for the children to pick coffee to add to the family income.  It’s quite sad knowing that these children will not be able to break out of the cycle of poverty that they live in because they will grow up with an education. 

We decided to talk some time to pray over a multiplex and while we were talking about their living conditions, a young boy of 13 came down from the mountain, tripping over a muddy root, with his bag of coffee.  He had spent the day picking coffee and his parents were still up the mountain picking.  His clothes were tattered and he hadn’t been to school in several years.  He seemed to accept that his life would always be a coffee picker.  The good news about this family is that his father was not an alcoholic, like most of the men in this tribe were.  Can you imagine making $7-$21 per day and having that be wasted on alcohol?  How devastating for these people.  And how devastating that the children’s future is not much more hopeful than that.

Our transportation into the village in Saltò

After 12 days in David we headed south to Panama City.  The first week we arrived in Panama City we spent time painting a private elementary school that YWAM runs in Panama City.  After days of painting we headed into what could be called “the bush” in Panama, close to the Colombia border, where we spent 3 days with the Embera tribe helping to build a house for a family in need.  We were near a town called Saltò and it is literally the hottest place we have ever been.  It was so unbearably humid and we are so blessed to have been able to sleep in a room that had air conditioning because without it, it may have been unbearable.  In addition to being hot, it is quite a dangerous place to get to.  Typically when groups come to build houses for the tribe they are escorted in by the Panamanian Army and are flown in by helicopter.  This is because there are many guerillas hiding in the forest around this area.  But as we were heading out, we were told that they had forgotten to coordinate being taken out there so we were going on our own.  As we passed through the final checkpoint in Panama, the man in charge at the check point drove after us, flagged us down and asked if we would be ok going in alone or if we needed an escort.  I just kept thinking to myself, “It’s a good thing my father doesn’t know about this or he’d be off his rocker”.  Obviously we made it out alive, praise the Lord!!

Painting fingernails in Margaritas

One of our favorite kids in Margaritas

After our 3 days with the Embera tribe, we spent 7 days with the Wounaan tribe in Margaritas de Chepo.  This was by far our favorite week of outreach.  We stayed at a pastor’s house right next door to a church.  90% of our ministry was interacting with the kids and the youth of this church.  It was great to be able to do ministry for the same people all week instead of the usual 1 time meeting people.  The kids were always at the church and always wanted to play with us.  And people from the community were always at the pastor’s house hanging out, talking, cooking.  These people are never alone.  Relationship is the most important thing to them.  This is the place that I got to practice my Spanish the most and Jake started learning Wounaan.  We had 2 people from our group preach at the church and it was amazing because one of them is deathly afraid of public speaking.  It was so awesome to watch God’s ability show up where a person’s ability feels lacking.   

Jake receiving his graduation certificate.

We finished up our final couple of weeks in Panama City and San Jose.  I did a lot of sewing in the last couple of weeks, while Jake did outreach with his team.  The final week in San Jose we got to stay with our great friends Douglas and Karen and their 2 sons.  We spent a lot of time with them playing games and talking about everything under the sun.  We were so blessed to have such great friends so close by. 

Now we are back in the states and getting settled back in.  We are trying to get caught up with people, but also trying to make sure that we’re re-entering “real life” gently so as to not have a shock to our system (the weather shock has been enough!!)  I’m currently looking for a job and Jake is going to start back at his old job soon.  Please keep my job search in your prayers.  I’ve applied for a few jobs that I’d really enjoy a few that are things that would tie us over.  I imagine things will be pretty slow moving with the holidays and all. 

We are so blessed to have people offering us places to stay while we get our feet back under us.  It is amazing to be taken care of in the way we have been.  God is so faithful!  

Off on a camping trip?

Hi everyone!  Unfortunately I don't have pictures to post at this time.  That's the bad thing about an internet cafe, you don't have all of your stuff with you.  But I thought I'd take some time to update you on all that is going on with us. 

We've been in Panama now for about 2 1/2 weeks.  We spent the first two weeks in a town called David, about an hour from the Panama/Costa Rica border.  We worked with many schools and lots of kids while we were there.  Because the YWAM base was too small to house us all, we got split up into groups and we stayed with individual families.  Jake and I stayed with a family from Wisconsin...well, all the Americans there were from Wisconsin...and they were the nicest people.  The first morning we woke up, they had coffee and a plate of cookies waiting for us.  The 2nd morning was coffee and banana bread.  They told us to help ourselves to anything and to make ourselves at home.  It was so nice to feel that kind of warmth and hospitality.  We didn't want to leave!  But alas, we had to move south to Panama City.

Panama City is HOT and HUMID!! This is the most humid place I've ever been.  We've been working in a local elementary school giving the outside a face lift.  Yesterday I got to so curtains for the school (it was quite nice having a day inside an air conditioned room!) while others continued to paint.  Tomorrow, we leave at the crack of dawn to a couple of indigenous villages for the next 10 days.  The cool thing is that we get to travel by canoe to the villages, after a 6 hour car ride.  I am sure I will have lots of stories when we come out of there!!

God's doing some awesome things here and will continue to do so.  I don't have much more time here at the internet cafe, so this is a short post.  I just wanted to keep you all in the loop as to what is going on. 

Please keep us in your prayers.  We are in the last 1/2 of outreach and that can be a tough time because you can see the end so close and it can be harder to have grace on the people that are always around you.  I've (Michelle) been reading the book of James over and over again, feeling oh so convicted about my heart and my tongue.  I am processing it with God and feeling growth coming out of it.  But there's a reason there are growing pains with growth!  :)

Love to you all,
Jake and Michelle

Yay, internet!!  They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and it’s true for the internet too.  We have returned to the San Jose base for a couple of nights after being in Nicoya, Costa Rica for 10 days.  There is no internet at the base, but you can sometimes connect through the neighbor’s place.  Since we have internet for a day, we had to take advantage of the opportunity to update you all. 

Nicoya is a town and peninsula in the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica.  It is quite a warm and humid place and most of it is very rural.  We spent most of our days doing various projects, including putting together and painting desks for a school, running kid’s programs, distributing Bibles to homes, serving food to the homeless, delivering flowers to women in the community, and building a house for an older man who lost his house in the earthquake last month. 

One of the desks.  It says "God loves you."

The YWAM base in Nicoya had several desks that needed to be put together and decorated.  We painted designs and Bible verses on all the desk tops, put them together and delivered them to a local school.  The kids loved the desks and were thrilled to have something so new and colorful to sit in. 

We ran a  couple of kid’s programs, doing skits for them, putting on puppet shows, worshiping with them, praying with them, and playing with them.  As typically happens, having a bunch of kids running around playing tends to turn all the adults into kids again too.  There were balloon animals and a lot of sword fights!!  One of the coolest things I saw was that each week they would put their prayer requests on a post-it note and put it on a board.  Then each week, they would go through the prayer requests from prior weeks and remove any requests that had been answered.  It was such a great way for them to see how God answers prayers.

Last month in the earthquake there were several homes in the area that sustained considerable damage.  There was a 94 year old man whose house basically collapsed after the quake.  Here, the government helps people rebuild or repair their homes after an earthquake.  The man applied for assistance, but they denied him because of his age.  They said it wasn’t worth helping him because he was old and would die soon anyway.  Well, that’s just not an answer that YWAM Guanacaste was willing to accept.  So we took the wood from his old house, separated the usable stuff from the garbage and started to rebuild for him.  We built the front wall and the back wall of a small house and another team will be coming in behind us to finish the project.  It was so nice to be able to tell this man that he hasn’t lost his value in God’s eye or our eyes even others don’t see it anymore.

The threshold...er...back wall of the house.

Jake really enjoyed being able to do physical labor, but I surprisingly, at least to me, my favorite part was the Bible distribution.  It’s surprising because I don’t really like the idea of doing anything in a door-to-door fashion.  But what really struck me about distributing Bibles was how humbling it was that God’s Word is so accessible and how He would have us distributing them all over.  Just freely giving His Word to people.  I mean, it’s His Word.  It is holy.  It is sacred.  And I just think about the fact that we get to touch it and give it to others.  It felt like such an honor to be able to bring the best gift to people. 

We leave tomorrow for Panama for more service projects, kid’s ministry and likely some evangelism.  We will spend several days living with a few of the indigenous tribes, which is bound to bring up some interesting food consumption.  But at this point in my life I’ve eaten ox tongue, chicken feet, a grub and today I had some vegemite.  So I say bring on the monkey brains! 

Please keeps us in your prayers for safety while traveling, safety from illness and for the rest of our outreach funds.  We still have a financial need of about $500 for outreach support.  We know that many of you have already reached into your pockets to help support us in the beginning stages of our ministry and we are so very thankful to you.  If you feel led to make a contribution to help support us, you can send a check made payable to “Aletheia Christian Fellowship” and mail it to 13076 SE Terra Cascade Loop, Clackamas, OR  97086.  You can write YWAM-Jensons on the memo line so it gets to us.  

Blessings to all of you!  You are in our hearts and our prayers.

Prayer for a friend

CANCER.  Such a dreaded word, isn’t it?  It seems to rear its ugly head in the places that seem the least fair and at the time it seems most inopportune.  Obviously there is no opportune time for cancer to appear.  But when it hits kids and young parents it seems especially cruel.

I found out today that one of the most giving, joyful, honest, caring, genuine women I know (and have known since we were 15 and took driver’s ed together) has breast cancer and it has spread to her lymph nodes (she just found out yesterday).  She is a wife and the mother of two young boys.  She is a friend, a sister, a daughter, a voice teacher and she is completely indescribable, though I will certainly continue to tray.  She brings the light of Jesus into a room when she walks in.  And she loves Jesus as deeply and truly as is humanly possible. 

This is one of her Facebook posts from today, they day after she finds out the worst news of her young life (I hope you don’t mind, Hayley):

“The funny thing about receiving such horrific news about your sudden, unexpected BAD health and what that means now for your life, is, aside from Trusting in the Lord and gleaning all that you can from the literal hundreds of loved ones who are surrounding you in prayer, you STILL awaken at 3:30 in the morning from a dead sleep, with tears in eyes, shakes in body and sadness in heart that it was in fact not just all a bad, bad dream.

It's easy to venture down the road of the extra scary thoughts and dwell on the extra sad thoughts about never being able have another baby... or the fear of the sheer pain of such extensive surgery... or the fear of losing my music studio.

But then, instead of getting onto sites that just deepen all these thoughts and fears, opening the Word of the Lord and finding something like this:

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Let the Glory be all Yours, Lord... through it all. ALL YOURS.”

Please, please keep Hayley, Aaron (her husband) and her boys Grayson and Lincoln in your prayers.  She is one of the most optimistic people I know and I know she will fight as hard as she can and when she can’t fight anymore, her husband will fight for her.  If you want to look at her blog, it's www.lifesprom.blogspot.com 

 

Abba, hold tight to this family as they walk through an unimaginable journey.  Continue to use them to bring glory and honor to your name as they continue to give their lives over to you.  Continue to shine your light through them and continue to put praise on their tongues so that you may be glorified and so that you might be known because of their testimony.  You, Lord, are in complete control and whatever comes you will never cease to be good.  You will never cease to be love. And like Hayley said, Let the Glory be all Yours, Lord…through it all.  ALL YOURS.

Earthquake Relief

Last week was quite the exciting week.  It started off like any normal week here at YWAM San Jose; Monday morning worship, work, classes.  But come Wednesday morning, as we were about to pray nonetheless, we felt the earth start shaking…and not in the good way.  About 80 miles from San Jose there was an earthquake that rated a 7.6 on the Richter scale.  To give you a reference point, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was a 7.0.  Fortunately, the quake happened about 25 miles below the earth’s surface (the Haiti earthquake was about 8 miles down), so with it being that deep the damage from the quake was not nearly as bad as the damage we’ve seen in countries recently.  They issued an immediate tsunami warning, which I think is pretty standard for any earthquakes that occur near an ocean.  Fortunately, there was no tsunami follow-up.

Two days after the earthquake the DTS leaders offered to send the DTS a town near the epicenter that had a family that was forced to live on the street because their walls had collapsed.  On Friday they told us to pack up our stuff and that we’d be sleeping in tents in this town because it was safer to sleep outside than in a house in case there were more trembles.  It sounded like quite the adventure to me!  So on Saturday morning a few people from another YWAM base picked us up, we filled up a 15 passenger van and we headed out for the 7 hour journey (Did you do the math? The epicenter, where we were going was 80 miles away.  It took us 7 hours.  Now have you done the math?).  On the way we met up with another YWAM group that would join us for the weekend. 

 

Jake and his tires...

After we met up with YWAM Nicoya, we got a flat tire on our trailer.   Thankfully, God was watching out and we got the flat tire just as we came upon a tire shop.  So we bought a new tire, then drove a few extra feet to have another tire shop install it. 

We arrived at around 2:30 at a local church that had sustained damage in the earthquake.  It was the church that told us about the family that was living on the streets.  Our leaders were talking with their pastor to come up with the work plan and about 10 minutes after we arrived there was an aftershock that rated a 5.6 on the Richter scale.  It was short, but felt much more powerful at the epicenter than the earthquake felt 80 miles away.  About 20 minutes after the aftershock came the typical Costa Rican thunderstorm, where thunder is so loud it is deafening and the lightening is stacked right on top of it.  Then the downpour.  When it started to rain, they started coming up with alternatives to us sleeping outside because we would have gotten soaked!  We split up into 3 different groups and 3 local families housed us (the pastor and his wife housed about 10 people…you got that Josh and Rose??  J).

Jake and I and another couple stayed with a family that offered us beds (all our friends had to sleep on mats on the floor) and made us an amazing dinner of fish, rice, beans and salad (our friends had to eat rice and macaroni and cheese) even though we were supposed to have gone to join our comrades.   We felt like royalty!

A wall that fell down at the church.

We woke up in the morning to the sound of monkeys talking in the jungles around us.  It’s a great alarm clock!  We then headed out to the work sites.  One group of us helped at the church and another group went to the family’s house.  Jake and I helped at the church, separating wood, cleaning things up, and mixing concrete so we could build a temporary meeting place out back.  We worked alongside members of the church and the women of the church made snacks, juice, coffee and lunch for us.  These were some seriously hospitable women!!  We worked for the morning and because of the large number of us, in about 5 hours we were able to get almost everything completed.  That’s pretty crazy to me!

The way home was just as interesting as the drive there.  We got a phone call that there was a landslide and part of the road was closed (it was actually a bridge closure due to the earthquake and the subsequent rain, which washed out part of the bridge).  We were told there was no way around.  As we were driving, a Costa Rican woman flagged us down and told us that there was a road we could turn down to get around it.  We circumvented that bridge, but it was followed up by another bridge closure for which we had to wait about 90 minutes on the highway because all traffic was stopped.  We were all exhausted from having done hard labor that morning and sitting in a full 15 passenger van in the heat of the day is not fun.  We just wanted to get home.  We finally did after about 9 ½ hours!

Macaws we saw on the way home

Even though there were several speed bumps it was truly an amazing weekend.  We got to provide emergency relief for people and while we were there we got to be taken care of  by a group of people with great senses of humor and huge hearts.  We got to work alongside other YWAMers and other Christians, united for the sake of taking care of those in need.  It was so great being able to leave out of consideration any differences in cultures or doctrinal beliefs because what was more important was that people were in need and that superseded anything.  It was great to see the body of Christ doing what it is supposed to be doing…taking care of those in need, like getting a family off the streets and back into structure they can live in, even if it is a temporary solution. 

Some people would call me crazy to continue to have hope in the Body putting aside its differences to do take care of others, but when I experience it firsthand, I know it’s possible.  It’s possible when we lay down our pride.  It’s possible when we decide that loving people is more important than being right.  It’s possible when our love for others is at least the same as our love for ourselves.  It’s possible when we don’t need to fit people into the boxes that we are comfortable with.  It’s possible when we lay down our religion and pick up our cross. 

Budgeting and Bed Bugs

Hi All!  Sorry for the delay in posting.  It’s been a busy few weeks with a LOT of stuff going on.  We have been doing a lot of moving, working, training and hanging out with each other after being apart for so long.

Bed bug ridden feet

Since I arrived at the beginning of August, Jake and I have moved around the base 4 times.  We are finally settled in the room we will be in until we leave for outreach in a little over a month.  About a week into me being here, I woke up in the middle of the night with an incessant itch on my hand.  I got up and put some cortisone cream on my hand and went back to bed not thinking much of it.  The next morning I inspected more thoroughly and noticed many small bites on my hand.  Then I remembered that Karen let me know they had bed bug issues in the room we were staying in.  They had fumigated once and had changed mattress and thought that would have taken care of things.  However, those creepy little bugs had taken up residence in the wooden bed from and wood baseboards in the room.   Throughout the day more and more bites started to surface on me (Jake got bitten a little, but not nearly as bad as me).  I had bites all over my body, including my neck and even my eye lids. 

As soon as we discovered the bites and how bad they were (Jake and I counted 75 just on my hands.  I had 10 bites on one thumb!!), we were moved into one of the rooms they put their really important guests.  It was like getting a night in a hotel!  The next day we took all of our clothes (except the clothes we were wearing) to the only laundromat in town that uses hot water since they don’t have hot water running to the washers on base.  We bagged up all shoes, suitcases, etc. into black garbage bags and took them to our friends’ house to sit in the sun for a few days to “cook” the stuff inside.  We each spent the next 4 days in 1 pair of clothes and I spent the next week on Benadryl 24 hours a day because it was the best thing to help me not itch. 

Home

After one night in the “hotel” we were moved into another room, then again into another room after that.  Now we are settled and have a great little set up.    

Home

Last week we hosted all Costa Rica YWAM staff at this base for staff training.  We had worship together every day, heard presentations from seasoned YWAMers and had workshops on a variety of topics.  A few days before the training I was asked to do a workshop on budgeting for people.  I obliged and put together a training to help missionaries create a budget, how to stick to it and how to use it for helping to raise support.  It was actually fun even though teaching is not my forte.   

The most exciting thing that happened last week was that God started revealing to Jake and I His vision for ministry and what He wants us to do.  We aren’t yet released to share what that is with the general public, but as soon as we are we will share it. What I can say is that it’s HUGE (for that I am thankful because knowing that it is so much bigger than we are makes it so much easier to remember that God has to own this…not us) and that God has been generous enough to let us know that it’s an Abraham vision, meaning that we will not get to see “the promised land”, but we can trust that the things that God uses us in will be completed by Him in His time.  

For now, we are praying and letting God speak to us about the ways that He wants to move in this.  We are also making sure we lay down that vision every day because we want to make sure that we never take it up as our own.   Please be praying for us.  We want to be hearing God clearly about His timing until He releases us to begin and we want to be able to hear what the next step is.

We love and miss you all,

Jake and Michelle

P.S. I love the sound of the rain here.  It rains almost every afternoon and when it rains, it pours.  The great thing is that we have tin roofs.  It is the most beautiful sound, even though sometimes it is so loud you can't hear people talk.  But it is beautiful because it sings of God's power.  It sings of His sovereignty.  And it sings of His greatness.  I can't think of a more beautiful sound!