Biblical Hope EQUALS Certainty

Life can be crazy sometimes. That is a big understatement for most of us. I have heard it said that we are either going into a storm, in a storm, or getting out of a storm. That's how it has felt for us.

A month ago I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Seemingly out of nowhere my body flipped a switch and started attacking my pancreas. From my vantage point this is bad. As a result, I didn't go to Papua New Guinea, I didn't get to participate in training pastors, or help encourage the missionary family there. Just doctors visits and shots, and wondering if I can eat "Brita bread" and chocolate chip cookies ever again (which thankfully I can, in moderation).  Why this disease? Why now? Why in the middle of mission training? 

After multiple doctor appointments, I was able to join Brita and the kids in Montana. They had been given tickets to stay with her parents while I was supposed to be out of the country for the Papua New Guinea trip.  I was so thankful to be back to reassure my parents and family, in particular, that I'm OK.  It was a great week and a half and we were thankful to spend the time with family and a few friends.  The trip home had Brita and the kids leaving Bozeman the same time as myself, but on different planes; Brita and the kids to Denver and me to Minneapolis. I was forced to fly by myself while Brita had all four kids to keep her company :)

The flight to Harlingen was uneventful and I had an hour to get home and pick Brita and the kids up at the Brownsville airport once I landed.  I had just taken a few steps off the plane when I got a call from my mom, letting me know that a routine heart treadmill test had revealed blockage in my dad's heart. The doctors immediately scheduled a cath to insert a stint in his heart if needed.  During that procedure they discovered the blockage was very bad and in the most difficult and largest artery going to the heart.  They immediately stopped the procedure and scheduled a quadruple bypass surgery two days later. What?!  My dad is 58! He works outside and is in good shape! He could have a massive, fatal heart heart attack at any moment?!

My head was swirling with questions and then I heard muffled voices and the phone when silent. I couldn't get an answer from my Mom and I was in the way of busy passengers trying to get out of the terminal.  A few minutes later my sister called very scared. Apparently as my sister was talking to my dad, he suddenly lost consciousness and had a mild seizure.  My mom had dropped the phone and ran to be with him.  The nurses called a code blue and every doctor from that floor came to revive him. Thankfully they did revive him and it sounded like a vein was pinched causing him to faint. Nevertheless it made all of us think it was his last breath. 

I flew to Billings, Montana the next day to be with my mom and dad during and after the surgery. By God's grace dad made it through the surgery and was discharged 5 days after surgery.

All this to say that in the last month we have been in a storm of sorts. God provides different types and intensities of storms as He sees fit. Spending five days in a hospital watching and waiting has been good for me. I was reminded what this world offers us and promises us and sitting in the hospital I see some of those promises exposed as the lies they really are. 

• This life will last. 

• You will live content if you have enough. 

• Money, insurance, and possessions will give you peace. 

• If you work hard, you can enjoy life during retirement. 

• You deserve it. 

• Make youth last. 

• Your health is the most important thing in the world. 

• You're strong and if you stay positive you can conquer anything.  

• Believe in yourself. 

• TV can numb the pain. 

• Affliction won't happen to you. That's for "other" people. 

• You will always have friends and family around you. 

• We can hope for good to come.  We can knock on wood.

This is the hope offered by the world. 

BUT the Word of God says and promises something different.

• This life is a vapor, a puff of smoke. 

• We are dying. We have sinned and the result is death and dying, pain and suffering. 

• There is nothing we can do to save our lives. 

• God sent Jesus to die for us, in our place so that we exchange our sin and death for His righteousness. 

• All who receive Jesus and believe in Him will be children of God. He will give peace and joy and abundant life forever. 

• Trials will come to those who love Jesus and those who don't. All of those trials will work for your ultimate good if you love Jesus. 

• When I am weak, then I see that I'm not God. 

• When I am weak I see that Gods power is shown more brightly. He gets the glory and I get the joy and peace. 

• You will live forever. 

• In Christ, your bodies will be made new. 

• Jesus will never leave you, will never be too busy to come to your hospital room, will never forget about you. He will be there in the pain and the loneliness when friends and family are gone.

Hope in Jesus is certainty.  It will happen.  When you see the word hope in the Bible it means certainty.  It's not wishful thinking.  It's as certain as the sun coming up, but more than that.  It's a great promise and a great comfort for those who know Jesus.

So take comfort in Jesus!  Every promise of God is yes in Him.  Whether we are going into the storm, seasick in the midst of the storm, or battered and beat up coming out of the storm, Jesus is the anchor for our soul!

Preparing for battle!

Fun in Montana!

We are NOT teaching the Bible!

That's right.  I was shocked when I heard this statement from my professor. What am I here for then?  I came down to school to learn how to teach the Bible.  In fact, this was a class on hermeneutics(how to study the Bible).  I've been struggling and striving to understand my assigned passage in the Bible this week.  I want to get it right.  I'm still an engineer at heart and I want to know exactly what the text is saying.  What's the main point?  What's the context?  Who wrote it?  What was the aim of the original author? What is the application?  I want to get the text right!  I want to teach the Bible!

But what my professor, Steve Leston pointed out in a very loving and straightforward way was that we are not teaching the bible.  We are teaching the Bible TO PEOPLE.  This is not academics.  This isn't merely to be right.  We are giving hope to people who have no hope.  We are holding out new life to people who are at best existing day by day.  The truth is, biblical hope equals certainty.  Not wishful thinking.  Not hoping it will be sunny today.  The hope offered by God through Jesus is certain!

We have been studying Genesis 1-11 recently.  I'm not sure why I forget this so often, but God has so much packed into each book of the bible, each chapter and paragraph declaring who He is, what He is doing, how He is pursuing a people for His own, how He is working, purposing, moving, revealing, sustaining, suffering, purifying, loving, and hold out His grace to a rebellious creation.  Genesis is no exception.

One of the fantastic exercises we did this week was to look at Revelation 21 and Genesis 1-3.  These book ends of the bible are incredible!  Typically we read the beginning of everything in Genesis and much later we read the end in Revelation.  But the similarities and differences between the beginning and end are stunning and worth looking at.  So look at Revelation 21:1-8 and list some of what is there:

Revelation 21:1-8                                          Genesis 1-3

New Heavens and Earth                                       God created Heavens and earth

God is our light                                                     Light created

God said it is done!                                              God rested from His work- Then went back to work

God making all things new                                   Created all things

God with them forever                                         God with them in the garden

No death                                                             Sin produced death

New Jerusalem                                                    Removed from the Garden

No gates                                                             The Garden entrance is blocked
Nothing will be accursed                                      Everything is cursed
Spring of the water of life                                     River to water the Garden

Tree of Life Given/Fruit each month                     Tree of Life off limits after the Fall

Leaves of healing

This is HOPE!  This is what the gospel offers in Jesus.  So l want to always hold out the gospel of hope to family, friends, neighbors, and the world.  So we are teaching the bible, but it isn't for exegetical perfection, but for life and hope in the Author and Perfecter of our Faith! 

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

When God Intervenes...

Dear Family and Friends,

God is sovereign. God never writes the story of our life the way we would write it. And that's a very good thing! If I were writing the story I never would have met my wife on a blind date. I never would have put myself in a church where I would hear the gospel of Jesus and be mercifully saved. These events altered the trajectory of my life forever. I'm so glad I'm not God.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”

“Or who has given a gift to him

that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

As most of you know next Tuesday I WAS supposed to go with my team of nine to Papua New Guinea to serve a network of local pastors with biblical training. This trip also includes a week of living solo with one of the national pastors in his village, as well as encouraging the current missionary family with To Every Tribe on the island.

However, God's ways are not my ways. I had not been feeling myself for the last two months. So with Brita's encouragement I went to see the doctor. My heart sank as I heard the doctor say I have type 1 diabetes. I found out type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune disorder that has caused my body to attack my pancreas and kill the cells that make insulin. Because of this I now need to give myself multiple insulin shots a day to control my blood sugar. This is a process of trial and error to get my blood sugars to normal levels. This may take a few months to work out. For this reason my doctor very strongly recommended I not go to Papua New Guinea one week after being diagnosed.

The doctor also said that within a few months I should be free to travel overseas. This means that we are still able to train and to be sent as long term missionaries!

• Praise that Jesus has truly been sweet through this hard time. What a Savior! 

• Praise for God's perfect timing. This could have been really bad in a remote village in Papua New Guinea. 

• Praise that through gifted tickets and frequent flyer miles our whole family will be coming home to Montana for two weeks during the time Josh would have been in Papua New Guinea. 

• Please pray for wisdom for Josh's doctors. 

• Please pray for patience and love for each other through this unexpected speed bump. Pride and selfishness are showing themselves much too often. 

• Please pray that the sugar in Josh's eyes would dissipate quickly so that he can see clearly again. 

This is hard, but God is so merciful. The night before my doctors appointment I was in Mexico teaching on 2 Corinthians 1:3-11. Here is a portion of it:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God... Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

and Psalm 119:50 says "This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life"

If God can raise Jesus from the dead(and He DID) how much more can I trust Him with this light and momentary affliction.

I can truly say with out any lip service, that I am excited to see how God will use the comfort He has given me through Jesus Christ to comfort others in their affliction. This has helped me to see how much I rely on myself and not on Jesus.

We want to keep this brief so we will be posting more in the next few weeks. We love you and are so thankful for your prayers and support as we rejoice in God's sovereign and perfect plan.

Josh and Brita

Dental Training and Clinic in village M

WE ARE NOT DENTISTS!  I realize I am stating the obvious here but just to put all of our perceptions in their proper place I want to affirm the obvious.  This is not formal dental school.  This is a quick training for simple cavities with simple hand tools and drills that do not need electricity.  This is training to help our village in a very practical way.  But not merely for doing physical good.  We want to build relationships to share the most important gift anyone can give, the Gospel of Jesus Christ! 

I (Brita) have been excited about the opportunity to receive dental training and participate in a clinic for more than a year.  The opportunity to show love by serving them in a tangible way that then may lead to opportunities to share the gospel was something that I wanted to participate in.  As the time drew nearer, however, I began to have second thoughts.  How could I drill a cavity and fill it with so little training??  And with no electricity!  Would I loose all courage the first time I saw a mouth full of cavities?  I was starting to get a bit skeptical about the whole thing but I was still excited to try.  

My Dad arrived to take care of our kids (Thank You Dad!!) and on Monday morning I headed off to class with Josh.  Our instructor put us in teams of two so that we could have an operator and an assistant working together.  We learned how do an exam to assess if the patient needs treatment, how to drill cavities, scoop out decay and how to fill cavities- on model teeth.  On the last day of training in the class room we did exams on partners.  My partner, Josh, had no cavities :)   

The hand tools we used.

Josh filling a cavity on a model.

Me working on a "cavity".

On Wednesday morning we loaded up two suburbans and headed south.

Our accommodations in village M.

The blue building is the clinic.  

When we arrived several hours later we split up into two groups to hand out invitations to the dental clinic.  It was exciting for me to see the village and meet some of the people.  Josh has told me so much about the village, but to see it for myself was invaluable.  I have not been out of the US since the summer of 2009 and it was once again eye opening to see people living in poverty.  

The next day was Thursday and we waited for patients to arrive.  I was chosen to do the first exam for our team.  I think Josh said something like "It's okay, you can go first."  Gulp!  After we identified what we thought were cavities, (they were really hard to miss!) Dr. Gerry came, did a quick exam and gave us instructions.  Our first patient had eight cavities in his four upper front teeth, two in his lower molars and needed two or three extractions.  We worked for a while and called the doctor over to check our work often.   Hand tools are much slower than the equipment a normal dentist uses.  The really cool part is that because of the slow process with no vibrating a cavity can be drilled, cleaned out, and filled with no pain.  Quite a few people came to the clinic because they wanted Dr. Gerry to extract one or more teeth (One 32 year old woman needed eight extracted!).  He did use anesthetic for the extractions.  There is just no way to make that painless.  Both of us were able to watch an extraction which was very educational!

 Josh doing an exam.

 Me checking the progress I was making on a cavity.

One patient brought her pet pig along for her visit.  She was reaching down and petting the pig for most of the time she was on the table.  The pig didn't like any of it and was loud the whole time.

We were able to see about 35 people over the three day clinic.  On the last day of our clinic while one of our teammates was waiting for a patient he was able to share the gospel with several of the villagers.  

While the dental work that was done to relieve pain and prevent future problems was wonderful, there were even better things that went on during our time in the village.  Relationships were built between our team and the people from village M.  The gospel was shared and we are praying that the clinic will lead to more opportunities to share the truth with those who need to hear it.  

We also had some wonderful times with the family of believers.  Even with the language barrier there is a bond between brothers and sisters in Christ.  It was encouraging to them and to us to study God's word together.  

R and A never smile in pictures :)

Thank you so much for praying for us while we were in Mexico!  We are so thankful that we have such wonderful partners!   

Christmas Break Photos

We had a really great time as a family over Christmas break.  Here are a few of the things we did...

 Josh was able to try his hand at body work on the dent we got last July.  You can read about how we got it here.

And lastly our lot near Harrison, Montana sold after being on the market for quite a few months.

Brita's First Trip to Mexico

Well, to be completely honest it was my second trip.  My first trip was in May 2000, but that was  our honeymoon ages ago!  This was my first trip to Tamaulipas, Mexico.  It was so fun to finally go across the border and to top it off we were able to do some Christmas shopping.  I enjoyed all of it- the walk across the international bridge, the vendors, the tacos, the sweet bread, and getting to spend time with Josh and our friends from To Every Tribe.  It was a wonderful day!  I'm going to post some pictures below but, all the northerners reading this have to promise not to laugh at how wimpy we southerners are.  It was windy and in the low 40's... I know, pitiful compared to 20 below zero or colder!  But you can come down and visit us in the south arctic.... just saying :)

Brita

 On the bridge over the Rio Grande

Rio Grande River

In Mexico!

We found a Mexican Costco.  That's a big bag of peanuts!

Lunch from a street vendor.  It was so good!

Sweet bread and coffee on our way out.  

It was a good day!

Without Hindrance?

We have been studying Acts and the light bulb went on as our week ended with our assigned biblical text exposition, which for me was the last 8 verses of Acts.  Do you know what the last two words of Acts are?  Without hindrance.  That may not seem crazy to you or me but look at the context.  Paul the great Apostle is in jail, under house arrest. The writer, Luke, ends the book with "proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance." Acts 28:31.  How can Luke end the book that way?  Paul WAS hindered!  Imprisonment and house arrest is a big hindrance in my book.  This would ring in the mind of the reader.  But...  

Luke was writing to Theophilus and the church.  The beginning of Acts opens with the "all that Jesus began to do and teach" and a promise that the few remaining disciples will be witnesses to the ends of the earth.  This seems like an absurd impossibility at the beginning of Acts.  But over and over again in Acts, God is advancing His kingdom through the preaching and teaching of the Word of God.  We see that they preached, taught, repented, believed, and the Lord added to their number, 2,000, 5,000, many, and so on.  In the midst of all of this, there is a constant theme of persecution.  But this persecution is used by God to spread the good news of Jesus to the known world.  So yes, we see Luke is encouraging the church that is facing persecution that this gospel will advance.

It will also advance by the work of Jesus, not by any person.  Paul, by the time Acts was written, may have been dead.  This would have been alarming to the early Christians and make them question what will happen next.  Luke is forceful with these words of "without hindrance" because he is showing God working all through Acts to expand His kingdom from the disciples to many churches all over the Roman empire (see the major markers in Acts 6:7, 9:31, 12:24, 16:5, and 19:20).  But Luke wanted to make very plain that it isn't by one gifted person that this good news will spread and people will be saved.   That is clear with Paul's imprisonment   The point is that Jesus is continuing the work He began to do through the body of believers in the Church.  This should be SO ENCOURAGING to us!  It isn't about me doing everything right.  It isn't about everything going according to my plan (which seems impossible in Mexico).  It doesn't mean that there will be no opposition to this work.   Most of all it isn't based on me at all, but on Jesus and His work.  We get to be little fingers doing His work and we stand amazed at what He does despite our huge weaknesses.

So when I feel so incompetent, when I am bombarded with the things of this life and feel that there is no way this gospel work can be accomplished when there is so much life going on, I can take encouragement that Jesus is working to accomplish His purposes.  What a joy to know we all can be missional wherever we are, in our weaknesses, and the kingdom of God will advance without hindrance!      

DAN'S TRIP TO MEXICO - By Dan McKenzie

 This week I was able to go to Mexico with my dad.   I was expecting heat, but it was cold, it went down to 53 degrees at 8 am!

The dirt road was full of holes.  The first day wasn’t too cold though, that day we went to   “R” and “A” ‘s   house for dinner,

Dan, R, and Dale

We were so excited to have warm drinks!

since I live way up north I had no idea what a Mexican taco tastes like until now, and I would say they are really good!  I have never tasted such good fish!!!!   And their enchiladas are amazing!   What’s really strange is that when we are eating at someone’s house the people who live there won’t eat with us, they would rather eat after.  But  at “R” and “A”’s house they will eat with us. After dinner we had a bible study with “R” and “A”. 

After one of the bible studies with R and family.

The next day we went to people’s houses and asked them if they want to come to a bible study the next day.  One person had a pet wild hog!   

Feeding a wild hog

Still hungry

Most of the houses had chickens and a dog or a cat, many houses had shells, crab pinchers, or fish scales strewn about from fishing, some of those shells were really cool!    One thing I like about going to people’s houses in Mexico is speaking Spanish to people, I don’t know very much Spanish, but I know a bit.  My favorite Spanish word is “frio”, which means, “cold.  Josiah and Elijah Lynam came on the trip with their dad too.   Josiah loved the hammock that was outside. That night we played some card games called “Uno” and “Monopoly deal”.  

Late-night game of hangman

The next day we did the bible study, Mr. Lynam told a bible story to the people.  After that we went to some people’s house and ate dinner there, after dinner Josiah and I played a marble game with some Mexican boys, It is really hard to learn a marble game if the people who are teaching you can only speak Spanish and say “one, two, three and four” in English.  So after that we went back to our house and went to sleep.  In the morning we drove home to Los Fresnos.  I really enjoyed going to Mexico and I would like to do it again!

   

THE LAST MONTH IN PICTURES!

Cornelius's vision in Acts 10

Peter comes to Cornelius

A class period outside!

The gym?

Our team leader showing us how it's done.

Paul "teaching" before chapel starts.

              

Clara preparing for the bush!

Pumpkin Carving! 

Paul gets to use a sharp object! Best ever!

Saw strange sights during lunch break!

Thank you for partnering with us for the advancement of the gospel!