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.