Mexico Update

I love to tell the story of when we were about to be parents for the first time.  I was 22 years old, had one semester left before I graduated in engineering and knew being a parent was a big deal!  So I did what seemed most logical to me.  I talked to people that had been parents.  I read a variety of parenting books.  If I was going to be dad, I wanted to be prepared.  So I read books and took lots of notes.  The things I learned were fascinating!  You need to be firm with your child yet loving.  You need to be consistent every time.  Sometimes you need to just let your child cry.  Yes. Yes. Yes.  I got this.

Not only did I want to be a good father, but I wanted to be a godly father.  I wanted to lead my children to know who God is, who man is, why there is sin and death, and how God displayed His ultimate love and justice at the cross.  I wanted them to know that God is not distant but very personal and only a relationship with Jesus will lead to eternal life.  So I studied the character of God and what it means to be a good father.  It all makes sense.  I'm ready.

When Daniel was born in 2002 I was overjoyed!  He was a precious tiny amazing little person that I was holding in my hands.  During those first two days in the hospital, I remember him crying maybe once.  I could see that all my studying was paying off.  I was a good parent.  But  something very strange happened the night we brought him home.  Everything I had read about and studied for became a reality.  It was no longer theory.

So as if it was yesterday, I remember sitting on the couch with Brita holding this precious little person who was screaming louder than I've ever heard a person scream.  I was firm and loving with Dan letting him know that it was not okay to be screaming now.  We were very consistent with diaper changes and feedings, and we even let him cry for a while.  And yet all of my research and studying was just theory.  When it came time to actually put into practice what I learned, it became very obvious some things would be helpful and some things would not.  At that moment on the couch, we would've done anything to get Dan to stop crying.  We both look at each other and said "what in the world are we doing?"  Somehow he made it through that night.

As a reflect back on that time in our life, I am thankful for the time I spent studying and reading about being a parent.  But none of that was a substitute for actually doing the work of parenting.

The same is true for missions.  We are spending two years training to be long-term missionaries.  We study hermeneutics, Biblical theology, missionary attrition, teams, conflict, systematic theology, how to cross cultures, contextualization, all while seeing our utter need and dependence on Christ.  This is absolutely needed.

However, until you actually go to the field, this is still theory.  That is why one week every month we go to northern Mexico.  We are seeking to plant churches in villages that do not have access to the gospel.  This is where the theory meets the reality.  We are so privileged to do the work we are being trained for!

Below you will find pictures from the last two trips.  We are continuing to disciple R and his family.  We are continuing to work with other families in the village ML.  The work at time seems so slow, but we are faithfully going month in and month out to serve ML.  We are not the lords of the harvest, God is.  He WILL accomplish His purposes.  Jesus has other sheep that are not of this fold. He must bring them also, and they will listen to His voice.  So we go with prayer, humility, a desire to serve, and the only message that can save.  Completely, fully, joyfully, eternally save.  It really is good news!  Please remember to pray for ML and the 90 people there in northern Mexico.  Thank you!!

PERU TRIP RECAP

What dream did you have last night?  Maybe you didn't have one.  Maybe you had a couple slices of pepperoni pizza and you had a crazy dream.  Assume for a second that you're a pastor in Peru.  The gospel of Jesus Christ has come and there are a few believers in your village.  Because you're the first to believe, you were supposed to teach the people about Jesus.  You have a Bible in Spanish, but Spanish is only the trade language.  You grew up speaking Quechua.  These few believers are looking to you to teach them.  Since dreams are so important in your culture, and since the way all other spirits have revealed themselves have been through dreams, you teach the people based on the dream you had the night before.

Now this may seem crazy to most of us.  But the truth is the just two years ago the pastors that we went to train in Peru, were teaching the believers in their villages in the Amazon jungle based on the dreams they had the night before.  We so often take for granted the biblical teaching that we get every Sunday at our local church.  We take for granted that God, who created the universe, revealed himself in a way that we can understand.  We take for granted that this God can be known not just by priests or pastors or missionaries but by everyone.

I had the privilege of going to Peru for nine days to teach 32 pastors how to study the Bible.  This was a very unexpected trip (a general video recap can be seen here).  There was room for one more person to go on the trip and I jumped at the opportunity.  So Trevor Holloway, Dustin Greenup, and myself went to Peru with Reaching and Teaching Ministries.

Reaching and Teaching Ministries exists to not only share the gospel with the unreached people groups of the world but to train them to be disciples and disciple makers.  The founder, Dr. David Sills, has traveled all over South America.  And what he has found is that people have come to share the gospel of Jesus Christ, but because there's not any followup teaching and training on how to be a disciple of Jesus, many people just added Christianity to their religion and Jesus is merely a good luck charm.  We were told of a common practice in the jungle and in the villages closer to the city where a person draws a circle with a cross in the middle of the house when someone is sick.  Then as people walk over the cross, a little bit of the sickness is taken away until the person is well.  As you can see, solid biblical training is essential!

The group of 32 pastors we taught in October, have already had four other modules in the last two years to help equip them to be able to understand and teach the Bible.  This training on hermeneutics was a tall task and all three of us felt the weight of what we were doing.

Expectations can be killer.  I once received some advice that has been so valuable.  Expect nothing and be pleasantly surprised.  That is true and so many ways.  Whether it is parenting, marriage, or training pastors, unrealistic or unmet expectations can harden hearts and kill relationships.

And so it was with us.  We were to stay in a hostel and our expectations were pretty low.  However our accommodations were great! It was nothing fancy by any means but it was nice and good.  I was able to have a clean room with the bed and the ability to hang my mosquito net.  A huge plus in my book.

Now for the unmet expectations.  All three of us were already scrambling because of the short time to prepare for the training.  But the first morning we got there we were told that we need to write a test for the pastors on the teaching they had two months ago.  We didn't even know what they learned. There was no way that we could administer this test! So the head pastor, Jairo, went ahead and gave the test and all went well.

That same morning of class we were told that we needed to have printed material for all the pastors in Spanish.  There was no way that we could do that.  We had just finished the teaching material for ourselves in English.  So our week of training was already starting on the wrong foot.  This is the point where we thought "what in the world are we doing"?  What miscommunications happened that we didn't understand what we needed to have with us for this trip?

But the most amazing part was that this unforeseen curveball that was thrown at us actually drove us to prayer and total dependence on Christ.  That fruit of humility helped us to depend not on ourselves but on Jesus.  So I can say the five days of training were very valuable for the pastors and us.  We saw pastors who were able to really understand that the Bible is not a mystery.  It is written in a way that it is very understandable.  And by the end of the week I can say most of the pastors we're excited to go back and teach and train their church who Jesus is and how to live as a Christian.

I can really say that I learned so much from these pastors.  Meeting men who traveled for four days in a canoe, being eaten up by mosquitoes, through three different river tributaries just to get training that they desperately need was very humbling to me.  How often I take for granted all the training and the tools that are readily available to me.

Some of the men that lived deep in the jungle told us of tribes that were unreached.  One tribe believes that a rainbow is a curse from God. So every time they see a rainbow it causes them to fear someone will die.  It is so sad that what was meant as a promise of God's goodness and faithfulness has been twisted to make people fear!  These pastors are going to these tribes to bring light to the darkness and to set people free from their bondage to sin and fear.  What a joy to be a part of that!

These same pastors also spoke of little groups of Christians scattered across the jungle who had no pastor and no one to teach them.  There's another group of pastors gathering together in January in the heart of the jungle but there's no one coming to teach them.  We were asked to go train these pastors too.  We aren't able to go, but it brought to our mind the need for training and the need to reach the unengaged.

Thank you so much for your prayers and support!  This is been a wild month for us but God is so faithful.  I'll have another update on our recent trips to Mexico very soon.

Serving alongside you,

The McKenzies!

South Asia Trip June 2014

Ok.  Finally!  I want to give an update on our South Asia trip.  I know it's been a long time coming, and I can't say that my reasons for the delay are very good.

So below you will find a bit of the back story why this trip came to be, what happened, and what it means for us in the "next steps" on this wild life of missions.  And of course I wanted to post a few more pictures of the trip.

As Brita and I were preparing to move to Los Fresnos, TX to go to the Center for Pioneer Church Planting(CPCP), we saw that a spring trip was taking place in South Asia and we were intrigued.  One of the members of the team posted about his experiences on Facebook and through that we were able to see a glimpse into their trip.  If you want to read about that trip, click here.  So when the opportunity to join that team on a trip to the same locations came up this past June, we jumped at the chance to see if this area might be where we would want to serve long term. The need is great in so many places.  There are so many unengaged people all over the world who have no access to the gospel.  We want to see where our family might be able to live and thrive.

The trip to South Asia or (SA) was a great trip for Brita and I.  We were able to go with a national pastor from Delhi to see the difficult and challenging ministry he has in the slums of Delhi.  These families are called the "untouchables" and as an American, we felt that there was nothing we could really do or say to help these families. We prayed for them and encouraged them to continue to listen to the pastor because he has words of life from Jesus.  Later he told us that there is a caste system in SA.  The system is based on the belief that people are born into a "high" caste or a "low" caste as a result of  good or bad works done in a previous life.  There is no way to change to a higher caste and there is no way to get away from the caste system.  While high cast and low caste people do not normally associate with each other, there is a third group of people called the "untouchables" who live primarily in the slums.  High caste people and low caste people will not even look at the "untouchables".  So for us to look them in the eye, talk with them, and pray with them was showing that they have value- being made in the image of God.

Then we took an 11 hour overnight bus trip to the edge of the Himalayas to meet up with another national pastor that is working in that area.  We were able to stay for the house church and worship with the few believers in his home.  We then took a 3 hour taxi ride up a crazy steep road and hiked another hour to get to a new believer who had heard the name of Jesus and was praying, a year ago, for someone to come and tell her about Him.  The team we went with were the same people who were able to share the gospel with her last year and now she is a believer!  It was a joy to encourage her and be encouraged by her.  She is the only Christian in the entire area where she lives and it's difficult to get to her, up in the mountains. She told of the peace and joy she now has and how hard it is to deal with Hindu priests and no other fellowship.

The other highlight was the opportunity to hike in the Himalayas to some villages that have little or no access to the gospel.  We hiked for two days and proclaimed the gospel to small villages and groups of people.  Some had never heard the gospel or even heard of Jesus!  To see that myself was crazy.  In the midst of the glory of God displayed mightily in the grand mountains, there is such spiritual darkness and a need for the Savior.

There were also challenges during the trip.  As we zigzagged across the mountain roads for hours, we saw that motion sickness is just a part of life here.  As a former construction engineer for a highway construction company, I thought it  was incredible to see hairpin curves, no guardrail of any kind, and the lack of water drainage.  I was very thankful for spiral curves in the US (connectors between straight sections of highway and arcs)!  If you don't have these transition sections, you feel lateral acceleration.  This is when the barf bag comes out!

The trip also brought back to Brita and me the memories of being in the Philippines for 6 months and the hardness of living in a different culture; sights, sounds, smells and seeming confusion.  It was a good reminder for us of the realities of a missionary life and gave a good balance to the trip. The least reached places are unreached for a reason.

We are looking at SA as one of the potential places we could go to, long term, after our training.  We really wanted to come back from the trip and say "YES!  We are going by the grace of God to SA".  Or we wanted to say "NO.  Unless the Lord does major work in our thinking, we do not see our family in this area".  But what we did come away with is a sense that yes it would be difficult to live here but we also could see our family living in the area. Please continue to pray for wisdom and direction.

First of many long climbs

Yes, that is a road.

Breakfast

Almost done with the 11 hour bus ride

Playing a silly game with the kids

One team member taking it easy

17,000 foot peaks

Bibles!

Psalm 97

The Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice;

    let the many coastlands be glad!

2 

Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;

    righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.

3 

Fire goes before him

    and burns up his adversaries all around.

4 

His lightnings light up the world;

    the earth sees and trembles.

5 

The mountains melt like wax before the Lord,

    before the Lord of all the earth.

6 

The heavens proclaim his righteousness,

    and all the peoples see his glory.

7 

All worshipers of images are put to shame,

    who make their boast in worthless idols;

    worship him, all you gods!

8 

Zion hears and is glad,

    and the daughters of Judah rejoice,

    because of your judgments, O Lord.

9 

For you, O Lord, are most high over all the earth;

    you are exalted far above all gods.

10 

O you who love the Lord, hate evil!

    He preserves the lives of his saints;

    he delivers them from the hand of the wicked.

11 

Light is sown for the righteous,

    and joy for the upright in heart.

12 

Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous,

    and give thanks to his holy name!

Summer Highlights

I wanted to give everyone an update on this past summer.  It was an incredibly good and busy summer in between the school year.  Here are a few of the highlights!

Trip to South Asia

Brita and I traveled to South Asia for 11 days at the end of June.  We went with three other families planning to serve long term in this area.  Brita and were so thankful to see the potential area To Every Tribe would serve in South Asia.  We mailed out a brief  sample of our trip and will be devoting a post to the trip in the near future.  Stay tuned!!

Family!

 

One of the best highlights of the summer was getting to spend some time with our family.  This was especially sweet for both sets of grandparents and I'm convinced even more that being a grandparent is icing on the cake, and there were plenty of treats to spoil all the kids ten times over!   We took advantage of the mountains and did a lot of hiking and huckleberry picking.  We even had some time for fishing some high mountain lakes!  The kids loved playing with their Nardinger cousins and looking for snakes and frogs in "The Bog"!

 

Reconnecting with Friends and Supporters
The other best highlight was to spend time reconnecting with some of our supporters and friends in Montana.  I say some because  we were hindered from seeing most of our supporters by 1.) the South Asia trip and 2.) Josh worked at A.M. Welles for a bit of June and all of July.

The South Asia trip was only 11 days but it took a tremendous amount of time to get organized and prepared for.  Not only that, we had to get everything ready for the kids to stay at the grandparents houses while we were gone.

Working for A. M. Welles was great! It allowed me to earn some needed income and they even put up with my schedule.  They are a great company and I am so thankful to be able to work with them.  I was able to build 3D models for the GPS dozers and graders as well as help manage the field end of one of their highway projects.  I can never get enough of designing a curve in a road and see a piece of equipment cut the design out of the dirt within a half inch tolerance.  But I'm geeky like that!

The down side was that we weren't able to see most of our friends and supporters.  So please forgive us for that!  There were so many of you we had hoped to reconnect with but it didn't happen.  Don't give up on us!  We are so excited to spend time with you this next June and July Lord willing.

As for now, we are knee deep in the first two weeks of school and feel like we come up for air sometimes.  My goal is to continue to get out more frequent and more concise blogs about what's happening with our training and the mission work we are in the midst of in Mexico.  So please check back on this blog or subscribe in the upper right corner of this page to get our updates.

Next up:
-South Asia Update
-Second Year training

Where is home?

Where is home?  That's a funny question to ask.  But as we spent the last two and a half months in Montana- the place we have called home all our life, the word "home" became a blurred vision of something that had been so simple and concrete in our minds just a year ago.  But as people we met this summer asked that fateful question phrased something like "Where are you from?" or "Where do you live?" I struggled to find the right answer.

The answer should be obvious right?  Well it depends.  We were raised in Bozeman but we are from Los Fresnos, Texas.  We are living in Los Fresnos, Texas but our life has always been in Montana.  And if you are asking where will we live in the next 1-2 years, I can't say anything more enlightening that "I don't know".  Those are the realities for this new life we lead, this missionary life.  That doesn't make it any easier, especially for a guy who loves to have the 3-month, 1-year, and 5-year plan laid out in all of its wonderful predictability.

However, there was an unexpected joy and excitement our family found returning to Los Fresnos.  We were excited to be home.  This is home for us right now.  That doesn't mean that our family and friends back in Montana don't hold a very special place in our hearts. They do!  But it does mean that God has been so gracious to us over the past year that we are eager to engage the life and friendships we have formed here in Texas.  At this time last year we were struggling with the shock of this very hot and very flat place. I still vividly remember Evelyn asking with all the concern of a 3 year old- "When will the mountains get here?"  We were struggling with the reality that you hear as much Spanish as you do English, Wal-Mart trip takes an extra hour and there is always sand in your car from the beach even when you haven't gone for two months!

Those very things about our new home were the very things we were excited to get back to.  They weren't scary foreign concepts anymore.   We enjoyed seeing the palm trees as we entered Los Fresnos and the Stripes gas station that has awesome homemade breakfast tacos (typically awesome food and gas stations don't go together but they do here).  We enjoyed hearing one person speak Spanish and the person respond in English and seeing a whole family out doing their shopping together even if it's a little slower shopping for us.  And of course we loved building our first sand castle of the second year here.

All this has helped me to realize one thing- God gives grace to help us understand the things that seem foreign and different are not bad, just different.  Not only that, He can help you to LOVE where you live and thrive there, not merely survive.  This is such as sweet realization as we spend our last year training for the mission field.  There will be culture shock as we move wherever the LORD directs us but there is also real hope that the same gracious God who made Los Fresnos feel like home will do the same in the future wherever we are as a family.


Upcoming Posts-

•      Summer Highlights
•     South Asia Trip
•     Preparing for our Final Year of Training

   

Mckenzie on the Move!

THOUGHTS ON THE FIRST YEAR   It's hard to imagine that we completed our first year of training and have made the 2,000 mile trip back to Montana for the summer (which was uneventful except the pig manure water sprayed all over the suburban in Dalhart, Texas).  This first year of training has been so good.  As I reflect on the year, three areas keep coming to the forefront of my mind. Here are  a few quick thoughts.   This year I have been given a tremendous amount of theological tools for long term mission work. How to rightly divide the Word of God is critical.   I have been given the confidence to take any section of scripture and teach it.  I had the privilege to use this skill many times in Mexico and in various bible studies throughout the year.   To see that everything in the Old Testament was written to anticipate, prepare, and show in a shadow form Jesus Christ  has opened wide the Scriptures to me.  I shouldn't be surprised, Jesus said almost the same thing in Luke 24:44.   I have so much to learn, but I'm excited to continue teaching and training others what I have received!        One of the amazing aspects of this program is that we spent one week every month for a total of 9 weeks with the people of Village "M".  We were able to practically apply our classroom training and build real relationships with the village.  "R" and his family(pictured above) have experienced wonderful growth in Christ!  He and his family are hungry for more discipleship and looking to help share these truths with others in the village.   My heart is excited to build on this foundation for next year.    Finally, the way the Lord has worked in my heart this year.  It has been an up and down roller coaster to depend fully on Christ alone and seek my joy from Him through deadlines and disappointments.  Constant school work, learning at warp speed, going into Mexico and leaving Brita and the kids for a week every month, and  most notably with the disappointment of being diagnosed with diabetes and missing the Papua New Guinea trip last February.    I do know that through those experiences Jesus satisfies fully because He is all sufficient.  Those same disappointments and stresses have also been some of the greatest sources of joy this year.  As David Sitton, the president of To Every Tribe reminded us, the Christian life is a paradox of sorrow and rejoicing.  Not one and then the other, rather both at the same time.  We've tasted some of that this year and long for others to taste and see that the LORD is good!     SOUTH ASIA TRIP THIS JUNE Last update we told you about a strategic trip Brita and I have the opportunity to be a part of in June.  For the sake of wisdom, we will now be calling the country we are headed to "South Asia". This is a precautionary measure for the long term work through To Every Tribe. Instead of telling you about the area we are going, take a look for yourself at last year's trip!   The harvest is indeed plentiful but the workers are few.   Please pray for us as we prepare for this trip June 23rd-July 4th.  This trip includes discipleship training for the few believers as well as backpacking into some of those unreached villages in the video.  We are so thankful for your partnership- both spiritually and financially. If you would like to invest in this trip please click here. PRAYER REQUESTS We know that the single greatest work for the gospel is not with our strategic plans or great teaching ability, but with prayer.   Our greatest work is coming before the Lord of the harvest, who WILL accomplish His good pleasure.  He is our strength and hope, period.  So will you join with us in"casting our anxieties on Him, because He cares for you"? 1 Peter 5:7 Please pray that: We will be able to clearly share all that God has done over the last 9 months with friends, family and supporters and "that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith, both yours and mine" Romans 1:12. We would be prepared spiritually and physically as Brita and I travel to South Asia at the end of June. The kids would thrive during this busy summer. We could connect with a few churches in the area who are interested in long term mission work.  CONTACT US! We are very excited to see friends and family over the summer.  Now that we are here, please contact us via facebook, email joshandbrita@gmail.com. Thankful for you,  Josh, Brita, Dan, Clara, Paul and Evelyn Mckenzie

If you would like to partner with us financially, click here