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Our
Vision:
To
inspire, teach and disciple the nations
in the
truth of God's character and Kingdom.
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Hello Friends!
We hope this update finds each of you
well, and we would love to hear from
you! Sorry for the long time it has taken us to update, but
this past month and a half has been quite busy! Right now
we are in the eye of the storm, and we are about to feel the
strong winds again.
After coming back from visiting with
friends and family in the beginning of August, we quickly
shifted gears into work mode. Jason spent about a week
painting the inside of our house which looks beautiful. We
had a team of friends help us move in, and we love it.
(Jason also replaced the kitchen faucet which fixed the drip
problem. What a blessing being married to a maintenance
man!) We have really enjoyed our new home for a little over
a month now, but sadly we are moving again. The lady who
leases this house to YWAM recently found out that she needs
to have family stay here, so she will not be renewing our
lease. The lease is over October 15th, but she
has given us grace to stay until the 22nd of
October if we need to. Praise God we have a place to go!
When Jason first told me the news, I didn’t know where we’d
be living because our ministry housing here is currently
full.
We found out that a YWAM couple will be
renting their house to the ministry, and we can live there!
Hallelujah! J
(Our monthly staff fees will cover our part of the rent +
we’ll pay electric.) The house is in a nice neighborhood
(where other YWAM friends of ours live)
about 10 minutes from our Dayspring campus here. It is a
great house ~ 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a closed in
garage as a bonus room. There’s a nice backyard, too. The
current tenants will soon be moving out, and then the owners
will be hiring someone to paint and re-do part of the
flooring. It will be great to have fresh paint and floors
when we move in! Many kind friends and family members have
volunteered to help us with this second move. Please pray
with us that all goes smoothly (that the current tenants
will be able to move into their new home even this week),
and that we will be settled into our new place by October 15th.
Then, let the nesting begin!
J
BETH
My Reading Class this year is a
delight! I have 10 girls, and one boy. (He is
doing just fine :) I have 2 South Korean girls, 1 boy from
Burkina Faso (west Africa), 1 girl whose mother is Colombian
and father is Brazilian (She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, and
English!), and 1 girl who is half French, half American.
The others are Americans. They truly are a joy. We have
had 5 1/2 weeks of school already. They are excited to
learn, and the phonograms are going really well. Around
Thanksgiving, they should be starting to read their first
book J. I have
2 wonderful co-teachers also, Emili Plumley from Venezuela
(who just got married this summer), and Sar ah
Vaughn from France. Sarah is married and pregnant with
their 4th child due in March
J. God has
blessed us with a couple of other helpers also which will
make the teaching transition even easier. It is wonderful
to have a team to work with as we disciple these precious
children in the love of Christ. (Planning and preparing is
much faster with so many hands!) I am continually thankful
for how God is using my desire to teach to disciple the
nations (even via Tyler, Texas
J). I know that
as we pour His Truth into each of these students, it will be
exciting to see where He leads them and into what nations
they will go.
My pregnancy is going really well,
praise God! I am currently 33 weeks along,
due on November the 8th (according to our last 2
sonograms). It is fun to see my belly growing bigger and to
feel Joshua moving so much these days. Jason and I are
doing childbirth classes which have been very informative,
and last weekend I had a wonderful baby shower in San
Marcos. We have been blessed by so many generous friends
and family giving us lovely baby boy clothes and all kinds
of other baby necessities
J. I am really
looking forward to being a mom and to being able to stay
home with Joshua Luke.
The Noah's Ark cake
with Joshua Luke's name on it was a delicious work of art!
Thank you Sandy (our
wonderful, long-time family friend) for organizing the
shower!
Who can guess the
size of the tummy?
I am planning on also leading a mom’s
Bible study to connect with other young moms in our
ministry. I know this is a new season God is leading me
into, and I’m excited. I can’t wait to pour out His love
onto our own precious son and these other ladies.
JASON
We’ve had a great kick-off to the new
school year. School of the Bible classes began on September
3rd. I spent about 3 weeks working with the
maintenance team to help prepare all of the housing for the
incoming students. We have nineteen students this year
from many different places. God has been bringing a lot of
Asians here to Tyler, TX to be trained and sent out. Our
SOTB class is made up of people from South Korea, China,
Papua New Guinea, Chile, and the United States.
I have taken on more responsibility
this year! I am overseeing the Curriculum of SOTB. We have
divided all the teaching material into three tracts, The
Biblical History Tract, The Theological Tract, and the
Historical View of Ministry Tract which looks at Church
history and how we can practically apply the principles of
the Kingdom of God to our lives and the world. I oversee
all the tracts to make sure that we’ve got all our materials
ready, that we have scheduled teachers, and that we are
keeping track of grading the homework.
On top of that I am teaching the Greek
class two days a week. Now before you confuse me for a
scholar, let me explain our approach to the study of Greek.
It is not our intention to have our students become fluent
in reading, writing, or speaking Greek. What we focus on is
the grammar of Greek. Since Greek scholars have gone before
us and done all the work, there is no sense in us
“re-inventing the wheel.”
In the Greek language of the New
Testament, the endings of the words tell us all the
information that we need to know about the word. Instead of
memorizing all those endings, we are able to look at the
Parsing Code that has already been created by those
wonderful Greek scholars. If we know what the scholars mean
when they tell us that a word is a Verb, Present, Active,
Indicative, 3rd Person, Plural, then we will open
up so much of meaning that is there in the Greek language
that gets “lost in translation.”
Let me give you an example! (Here I
go teaching!)
Eph
5:18
“And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation,
but be filled with the Spirit”
The
“be filled” is in present tense. In Greek, present tense is
a continuous kind of action.
So it might well be translated, “be (continually) being
filled with the Spirit.”
Notice how
in English it can sound like a one-time event.
But when we
understand the Greek, we see how Paul tells the Ephesians to
continually be filled with the Spirit, daily dying to
themselves and living a lifestyle of fulfillment in their
relationship with God
instead of trying to find it in ways that can be
destructive!
Understanding the grammar of Greek will give us a richer and
more in-depth knowledge of Scripture. Because of their
studies in Greek this year and with the help of the Online
Bible Program, the students will be able to translate 1 John
into English by the end of the year.
Pray for
me and the students this year. I am still learning a
lot about the subject. And it is one thing for me to
understand it, and another to be able to communicate well so that
others can benefit from it.
May God
bless you and keep you,
Jason and
Beth
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