NTM

NTM has issued the following statement for us to use to inform our friends and families of the situation here:

"In light of increased levels of violence in some areas of Mexico [including our city], we are taking precautions that will help safeguard us and our ministry.  While nothing can guarantee safety anywhere in the world, the steps we are taking will help minimize our risks while enabling us to carry out our ministry.  Remembering that God is our refuge and strength, please join us in praying for safety, stability and wisdom, so the Gospel can advance in Mexico."

Email us if you have any questions, and THANK YOU FOR PRAYING!

Praise the Lord with us!  We received the results of our language evaluations, and we did much better than we thought!  We still have a long way to go, but we have worked hard and it is so fun to see God blessing our efforts.  He is the one who gives us the ability to grow in our language abilities, and we praise Him for that.  He is so good to us!  For more details, read the related news article.

We each left our Spanish evaluations with a great deal of anxiety and disappointment, knowing we had made mistakes and realizing we speak a lot better when we are not horribly nervous.  But we were apparently too hard on ourselves (those who know us well are not surprised).

We recently received the results of our evaluations, and both of us are now testing at a higher level than where we each tested last time.  In fact, we are extremely encouraged to hear that we are progressing very well.  In addition, we received excellent feedback regarding what areas we should focus on in order to continue progressing over the next several weeks.  Our leaders here are very good at seeing where the "holes" are in our language learning, and then helping us know how to tackle those weak areas.

There are basically ten levels in our language rating system:  Basic warm-up, basic-mid, basic-high, progressing-low, progressing-mid, progressing-high, capable-low, capable-mid, capable-high and superior.  Because we do not plan on ministering long-term in Spanish, we only have to reach capable-mid level before we can move on to a tribal language.  About three months ago, Aaron tested at about basic-mid (having come with ZERO Spanish, he had to build slowly).  Last week he tested at progressing-low!  That is huge growth.  I tested at about progressing-low last time, and this time when I tested, she was hesitant to be specific regarding what level I am in, but she said I am beginning to move out of progressing.  I assume that means I am somewhere around progressing high.  Yippee!

Praise the Lord with us!  We are so excited!

    We have a Spanish evaluation coming up sometime in the next few weeks.  We are hoping to test at a higher level than last time, but we know we are nowhere near being done.  We’re studying, studying, studying, and we sure appreciate your prayers!

    Many of you have asked us how much longer we will be studying Spanish before we go to the tribe.  The short answer is "We don’t know for sure." 

    The better answer will take a couple of paragraphs to explain, but it’s important …so here we go.  New Tribes Mission of Mexico requires their tribal missionaries to learn Spanish to a very high level.  In the past, missionaries were allowed to move on to the tribal language after simply completing a basic book course in Spanish.  For many good reasons, the standard has risen higher and higher over the years, and even within the past year the standard we have to reach in national language (Spanish) and culture learning has risen dramatically.  By the time we graduate the Spanish program, we will be able to function at a high level in the language, even being able to clearly communicate Biblical truth in Spanish in a culturally appropriate manner.  That is just not accomplished by what I call the "microwave version" (taking a quick course and filling out a few notebooks so that we can hurt people’s ears by butchering their language). 

    Kevin Gutwein, chairman of the field committee here in Mexico, told us that in all his years of consultant work among very difficult languages, he has never once been wrong in saying that an average language learner can learn any language in 4,000 hours of study, so long as those hours are spent the way that we have been trained to spend them.  Thankfully, Spanish is much easier than many tribal languages, and we don’t have to reach quite as high of a level in Spanish as we will have to in the tribe, so we are hoping to accomplish our goals with fewer than 3,500 hours.  Nevertheless, we use the 4,000 hour guideline as a rough picture of where we are at. 

    Aaron’s goal is to complete 50 hours of culture and language study each week (that’s rough, since we’ve heard that 4 hours of language and culture study while living in a foreign country takes the same toll on a person as 10 hours of manual labor).  In a perfect world, putting in 50 hours a week would allow him to complete 4,000 hours in 80 intense weeks.  We began our actual language study at the end of August after we got all moved in, etc.  So that means that the perfect world version would have him finish 4,000 hours in March of 2009.  Unfortunately, as you all know, we do not live in a perfect world.  Sometimes trucks get stolen, people get sick, kids have extra-needy weeks, people need breaks, government papers have to be processed, friends need help putting their house back together after a robbery, things break, culture shock comes and goes, and bad things happen to good people.  Good things happen, too, like holidays.  And I am one of those picky wives who won’t let my husband work on Christmas. 

    So since we do not live in a perfect world, we have a VERY TENTATIVE goal of finishing by the end of the summer of 2009 (two years from our arrival to the field).  This seems to line up with the timeline that we have seen in our fellow Spanish students who have now graduated.  After graduating, we will work to get permission to live in a tribal village, where we get to start all over again!  Yes, we have signed up for a long haul.  We are SOOO glad you signed up, too, when you committed to praying for us for the long haul!  Thank you for your prayer and support.  We need you!

We have another Spanish evaluation coming in the next couple weeks.  This is a big deal for us, so please pray with us that we will test at a higher level than we did last time (we’ve worked hard since then!), and that our test results would give us clear, positive direction regarding where the "holes" are in our Spanish abilities.

For more information regarding our anticipated timeline for finishing Spanish, please check our news article:  The Answer You’ve All Been Waiting For.

Thanks for praying.  We need you!

    We recently had the privilege of joining one of our supporting churches (Central Point Community Bible Church) on their family mission trip to Baja California.  We were with them for about a week, in which time our team traveled to a little village east of Ensenada, framed in a bathroom, reroofed a large building, replaced facias of other buildings, repaired a camp go-cart, did crafts and magic tricks with the children, and served a meal to the community. 

    For most of the time, we were serving in a camp that is used by a Mexican church nearby.  That is where the building projects took place.  But we also got a little bit of time to spend up in the village, using our Spanish as we interacted with the people.  This village is made up of tribal people who speak one of the Mixtecan languages from Southern Mexico.  For our sake, they were all speaking Spanish most of the time, but I did catch a side conversation once, as two ladies were speaking their native tongue.  What a beautiful language!

    Baja is very different from Chihuahua in many ways, and we enjoyed the opportunity to know another part of this country God has given us.  We are AMAZED at how different the border crossing was there.  We just drove right in, as Americans don’t even need visas there!  In addition, we were surprised at how many things reminded us of the USA.  There were so many signs and billboards in English, and there were United States citizens all over the place.  Also, many of the locals spoke a significant amount of English.  Perhaps some of these things would not have seemed strange to us had we not lived in Chihuahua first. 

    We were so blessed by the opportunity to build stronger relationships with our friends from Central Point, and to serve with them in Baja.  What a precious group of people!  CPCBC is a very special church to us.  In addition, we felt a little spoiled by the chance to visit Aaron’s parents and two of his siblings in Arizona on our way there (Yes, it’s on the way.  Driving through the US to get to Baja is much faster and easier than driving through Mexico).  Nevertheless, we are glad to be home, and back to our Spanish studies!

    For pictures of our Baja trip and our time with Aaron’s family, see our photos page.

We are not exactly roughing it here right now.  Here we are at February 13th, and we have the windows open to let the nice warm breeze drift through the house.  We are used to very cold weather clear past Easter where we are from, so we hardly know what kind of date to go on for a Valentine’s Day in the 70’s!    The nights still get cold but the days are pretty much a perfect 72.

Don’t just sit there feeling jealous.  Come visit!  Or you could just wait until June to brag about your 70’s while we’re roasting. 

Well, I can’t say that we were well-rested PHYSICALLY when we returned, but our brains were rested after our recent Christmas trip.   We traveled to Texas and Arizona and then made our way back here to Chihuahua.

My parents, my sister Karen, my sister Kate and her fiance Daniel all joined us in El Paso for Christmas.  It was our first Christmas with Daniel (welcome to the family, Daniel!).

In Arizona, we visited Aaron’s parents and celebrated Wesley’s 5th birthday with them.  Happy Birthday, kiddo!  Also in Arizona, we visited a church that supports us.  What a treat it was to see our brothers and sisters there.

We did some Spanish study while we were gone, but not much …we needed the break.  Now we are back, with renewed enthusiasm for tackling this language.

Teenage boys, wars, dessert and Aaron …sounds like a guy’s Bible study to me.

Aaron cannot help it.  He just has such a heart for teenagers!  Get him within ten feet of a group of teenagers, and you can be certain that he will have some crazy plan in the works within minutes. 

It didn’t take long for the teenage guys here to figure out that Aaron is definitely a guy they want to hang out with.  So they asked him to lead a guys’ Bible study for all the high school age MK guys (MK=missionary kids).  Aaron’s favorite topic to study with teenage boys is:  The Baddest Battles of the Bible.  So that is what they started with.  They are right in the thick of the Old Testament, finding out what God has to say to them in the midst of a bunch of war stories.  And it is changing their lives, as God’s Word is in the habit of doing.

I have no idea how many times people have come up to me and told me that my husband is an answer to their prayers.  People have been praying for years that someone gifted in youth work would come and minister specifically to the teenage guys.  Even though his main ministry right now is Spanish, God is using Aaron to meet this very real need.

Sorry for the shameless bragging, but I’m pretty proud of the guy. 

Our little family has had the extreme joy of volunteering two to four times a month at a local orphanage.  What a blessing this has been!  The children of Jeruel, a local children’s home, have captured our hearts. 

Each time we visit, we try to come up with a creative way to brighten their lives.  At this point we don’t know enough Spanish to clearly communicate spiritual truth with words …so we are showing them what spiritual truth looks like with skin on.  Each time we visit we play games, talk, help with homework, smile a lot and show genuine interest in each child.  We also give LOTS of hugs.

This week when we visited, I looked around at the children interacting with one another and realized there was very little physical contact.  It was no wonder, then, that there were two children plastered to me, one on each side, and that there was another one standing in front of me, stroking my hair.  It was also no surprise that there were about ten more standing as close as they could to me without running over their friends who were already hugging me. 

What a gift it is to feel loved.  I have often thanked God for my amazing parents, but I think today is the first time in my life that I thanked God for parents who hugged me.  It is a new goal of mine to hug as many children as I can each time I go to Jeruel.  If I am part of Christ’s body, I want that body to give hugs.  These kids are starved for affection.  I want to love them.  In doing so, perhaps their little hearts can soften to their Savior’s love.

Pray with us that the day will come soon that we will have the skill in Spanish to be able to clearly communicate God’s love to them.