It's been a while since our last update. In the last month we finished SBS, packed up our house, drove across the country, moved back to our favorite place on earth, attended a multi-day family reunion on one side of the family, spent the Fourth of July with the other side, and finally started working again and settling into normal life!
My favorite sight during the road trip: the first sign for Boston! A welcome reminder that the driving was almost over!
Second favorite sight: we stopped to see Niagara Falls (the US side):
Other exciting moments: documenting each step of the way...
...because we won the ipad contest! Thanks to all of you who voted! We successfully placed in the top ten and got the ipad 2, and came in second place overall, just missing the grand prize of the imac. Slightly disappointing, but mostly really exciting! (Click here to watch the 2-minute video documenting our trip)
For now life has slowed to a comfortable pace. Jesse's landscaping and I'm returning back to the place of my very first job-- Dunkin Donuts! Ah, how I've missed smelling like coffee... We're also apartment-hunting, and I'll soon be cramming in calculus and chemistry reviews before I attempt to take further courses in the fall after not using that side of my brain for a few years. Yikes.
Thanks again for all of your prayers, and an extra big thank you to those who have continually showed enthusiasm for what we're doing and how God is leading us. This phase of life may be less eventful than the past couple of years, but we know he's still doing big things in us and still planning big things to do through us. It's such an encouragement to know that there are people cheering us on! We love you!
We're getting close enough that we're counting down by DAYS now, instead of weeks! YAY! We're also taking a photo a day of us with the number of days left.
18 days from today we'll be home!
We're also flying through a whole bunch of books! We're almost done with the Old Testament! This week we covered Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah.
Dear SallyJo, forgive me for this not being the most flattering picture of your face!
Next week we have two tiny more prophets (Haggai and Malachi) then on to Matthew, our very last book! AHHH! Hard to believe it's so close.
In other exciting news, we've entered a contest to win a free ipad and imac! Zagg.com is holding a "What would you do?" contest, and we got picked in the top 30 finalists. If we get picked as one of the top ten (we'll find out the day that we leave) we agreed to paint their logo on our cargo trailer that we're pulling home, and we'll document our trip which advertises their site. Click to vote for us! We're the first one on page 2! If they like our video of the whole event and they deem us worthy, we win the imac and ipad! (It's about a $1700 value)
We also dove into our 2-weeks-till-we-leave To Do List! This weekend we packed up all of our kitchen stuff and put back the stuff that belongs to the people who usually live in this house. We'll be using their stuff for the last couple of weeks.
With only 18 days left until SBS graduation, our schedule is looking crazier than ever with final homework assignments, last-minute social engagements, and cleaning and packing up the house. It's starting to feel real, yet still unbelievable that 8 months have gone by so fast.
This weekend we started tackling the cleaning and packing. We're planning to do a little bit each weekend, since we'll be driving out immediately after graduation and won't have the time to do it all at the last minute. We were really lucky this week to have some help!
Jesse did the lawn work
Our good friend Graham is a window-washer when he's home, so he brought his fancy rags over to do our windows for us.
Our friend Joel offered to help too, so we put him in charge of burning 8 months worth of cardboard that we'd been stockpiling in the garage. It may have been a little bit out of control at one point...
I stayed inside and did the usual cleaning stuff, then started packing up our least-used items.
Everybody breathe a sigh of relief for us! I don't mean to ever imply that 15-hour days of nothing but Bible study are anything but a privilege, but believe me when I say that finishing our Jeremiah assignment this morning was like the first sunny day after a few weeks of rain (which, by the way, we would really appreciate)! This was the last of the really big books, and for the next four weeks we'll be cranking out smaller books at a much faster pace.
Lectures this week were done by our favorite teacher. This is a picture of the timeline of the book of Jeremiah. It's hopelessly unchronological, so this was a HUGE help in figuring out what went where.
We'll be studying Daniel for the first half of this next week (my favorite book!) and for the second half we'll be studying Zechariah. Judy Smith, co-founder of the School of Biblical Studies, will be teaching us Zechariah. She's a wonderful teacher, so we're looking forward to it!
This is a picture of the sunrise last week, taken as I walked to my 6-am bread-baking duties.
Thank you, God, for putting us someplace that's nice to look at :)
I'll apologize in advance that this is a lot longer than I intended it to be. I figured I'd go ahead and post it as-is though. FINALLY, we're letting everyone in on the big story of what's next for Jesse and Amy!
No, we're not pregnant.
We’re planning to start a ministry in New Hampshire, which we’ll be calling Deeper Well.
The Mission Statement
Deeper well aims to transform the city of Dover, New Hampshire through mercy ministry, evangelism, and discipleship of both new and old believers. Rather than participating in individual mercy ministry events, we desire to live a lifestyle of dedication to our community and consistently recognizing the people around us and meeting needs where we see them. Evangelism will naturally but intentionally take place as we meet these people and come to care for them. As people come to know our living God and find hope in him, we will facilitate their growth through one-on-one mentoring, small groups and classroom-style teaching on the Scriptures. Since each worker has different gifts and a different God-given role, we aim to place people where they specifically have the gifts, passion and vision to help people be transformed to reflect God’s character. Our long-term goal is to see those we have evangelized to eventually become evangelists and teachers and disciplers themselves.
The Back-story
During our time in Africa, we felt God leading us toward a future ministry of some kind, though we didn't know what. The closest we could figure was that we might plant a YWAM base in New Hampshire.
We did a 6-week leadership seminar last summer called DTS Equip, where learned more about how our personalities and gifts and passions factor into the calling that God has for us. There we realized the huge role that teaching would play in our future. That time also confirmed our desire to disciple Christians to discover all that God has for them.
Throughout our 9 months in SBS, we’ve uncovered a deep desire to give people solid biblical teaching, and the tools to study the Bible correctly on their own. During these last few months God has given incredible clarity to the vague vision that we had in mind when we started in September.
The Vision
As the mission statement describes, we want to focus on evangelism, mercy ministry and discipleship. Evangelism, because our desire isn’t to lure bored Christians away from their churches into a more ‘exciting’ looking thing. Actually, we want to do the opposite. We want discontent Christians to rediscover what Christianity is all about so that they’re more active in their own churches and in the lives of the people around them. We want them to realize that there is always more we can learn about God; we shouldn’t ever have the chance to be bored! As we see more people coming to Christ, we’ll need to make sure they learn more about who God is—his nature and character, the necessity of sharing the gospel, of learning his Word, etc. We have dreams of small groups and of evening classes or multi-week seminars to pass on some of the things we have learned about studying the Bible. We want people to discover their own spiritual gifts and begin to use them as part of the body of Christ. We have lots of BIG dreams too—of full-time ministry, of seeing people saved and healed, of taking outreach teams to other countries. We dream of having a large group of people on board with us who all want to see the same changes in our city, who donate their time and money to see it happen. It’s sometimes hard to know what to call our ministry. It’s part church, part not. Our goal certainly isn’t a Sunday morning service, but it’s easy to see it ending up there. We could talk for hours about the many different ways that this could look, but we’ll spare you the ramblings! All we know is that God will reveal more and more as we go along.
“And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.” Acts 2:42-47
The People
We’re excited to have our good friend Ben joining us for this endeavor! He is one of the ones who has been there since the beginning of SBS, staying up late many nights talking with us about all of our dreams for the future. Even though New Hampshire is our home and not his, this is just as much his dream as it is ours. He’s ready to make Dover his home and be committed to seeing change in this area.
We also have a couple of other friends who are seriously praying about joining us. Even if they don’t come right away, we’re excited about the possibility of them coming along in the future to help us get things off the ground.
The Timeline
6 months – 1 year:
We’ll get settled back into “real life” after being in the YWAM bubble (off and on) for 3 years. Amy is returning to UNH to finish her computer science degree. Jesse and Ben will be working with a landscaping company to open up a new division of work there. This is one of the ways that we plan to support ourselves as we won’t be in full-time ministry at this point and won’t be raising support. Jesse and Ben are both considering their options for further education and praying about what path to take.
During this time we plan to be intentional about the friendships that we make and the mentoring relationships that we seek.
1-3 years:
We have a lot of goals for this stage. We would like to start up small groups at this point, and possibly start up small bible classes through existing churches for people who feel inclined to learn more than they get at small groups and Sunday sermons (And no, we’re not bashing either one, but young/immature Christians could certainly benefit from learning early on how to study the Bible). At this stage we plan to be spending a significant amount of time teaching and helping people grow, but we will still be finishing up school and working part-time. We may raise support during this stage, but that’s still unclear at the moment.
If possible we would also love to travel and teach in Schools of Biblical Studies around the world. Second and Third World countries often have a very difficult time getting teachers to come to their schools because of the cost of travel, but we have a big heart to raise our own support and help in these places if possible. In many of these countries, pastors earn their positions simply because they were the first convert in their village. They desperately need solid biblical teaching, and by taking a week or two to go and invest in one of those SBSs we could actually be helping many different ‘pastors’ how to correctly study the Bible and lead their congregations in truth.
3-5 years:
By this time we hope to have a building in which to hold classes and have group meetings. We hope to have a group of people who are enthusiastic about evangelism and reaching out to their neighbors. We want to make teaching a nearly full-time job. Again, when possible we hope to travel to teach in other countries and/or bring teams to do outreaches.
Video For those of you who missed it the first time around, we got to share our vision with our SBS a couple of weeks ago and we got video of it. It's basically the same information as above, but if you're interested, here it is!
This week we were privileged to have Dr Ronald Youngblood as our teacher for the book of Ezekiel. He's just a couple of months away from turning 80 years old and has spent most of his life studying the Old Testament! He helped translate the NIV Bible and worked on the Nelson's Bible Dictionary, just to name a couple of his accomplishments. Read his official biography over at Zondervan. All of his study and experience was definitely helpful on this book, and he's an adorable little man. We thoroughly enjoyed class this week.
It's been a BUSY week though. Ezekiel is the third largest book in the Bible, so the work load was similar to the week that we did Isaiah, plus we had an extra day of class this week. Dr Youngblood has too much information not to take advantage of him being here! Needless to say we're both in a little bit of an over-tired state at the moment. Five more weeks of class seems like a lot, but after next week (Jeremiah) it will be a little bit of a downhill to the end. Then a week of fun road-tripping, and we'll be home for good!
Financial Update
I've been keeping a close watch on our expected expenses from now through the second week of July (our first hope for a real live paycheck from real jobs!). Assuming our regular amount of support comes in this month and nothing unexpected arises, we're only about $500 away from being able to cover all of our expenses. We've already been promised the money to cover our trip home, which is our biggest expense in the near future. However, it's also the farthest away. So our $500 need is a little bit time-sensitive; our current bills need to be paid by June 1st. Once those are paid, we should be all set until getting home.
If you'd like to help us with these last few expenses, let us know! As usual, support can be sent through Grace Community Church or given through Paypal. Click here for details.
Again, thank you SO much to everyone who has helped us get this far!
PS- We haven't forgotten that we haven't told all of you what we're doing next. We did a presentation here a couple of weeks ago and shared our vision with our class, and we took video of it. If you haven't already seen it and would like to, here it is! Admittedly, it's a really long video, so we'll post a shorter summary soon. Be sure to check back!
This week was another small book week. We studied Micah, Habakkuk, Obadiah, and Zephaniah, and spent Saturday preparing for burying ourselves in Ezekiel this next week.
This week also marked our last teaching of the year. Jesse and I both love teaching, and I wish it was a bigger part of our course. This teaching was on the book of Habakkuk.
I chose to pretend I was talking to a team that was about to go on outreach to Japan-- a place that desperately needs some hope in the midst of terrible circumstances. So after going through the historical background of the book and talking about the main message of the book, I focused on one of the last verses in the book:
"Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail, and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there by no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation" (Habakkuk 3:17-18).
I loved this little book. If you've never read it, DO IT! I love that Habakkuk-- God's prophet-- has trouble accepting what God says he's going to do. That last verse is so powerful when you understand that Habakkuk just heard that God was planning on wiping Judah out for their sin AND he was going to use an ungodly nation to do it. It was a big deal for him to come to the place to be able to say, "Ok, God. I trust you. I know what's in front of me is TERRIBLE, and there's literally no hope that you're going to change it. You've promised that this is what's coming. But I know your character, and I know who you are, so I trust you."
I promise not to preach. But seriously, go study Habakkuk. If you do it and you're confused, I'd be more than happy to share my historical background summary and powerpoint! (And just to clarify, Jesse would be more than happy to share about his teaching as well, but you get to hear about me because I'm the one doing the writing!)
Anyway, on a less serious note, Jesse and I did some rearranging! We sort of hit the wall a couple of weeks ago and knew we needed a serious change of scenery. So we moved Jesse's big desk out of the office and into the living room so we could be in the same room. Then I started piling my things up on the big bookshelf so I can work standing up and save my back from so many hours of sitting! This was in response to this article about the terrifying effects of sitting all day long.
Woohoo! I'm very much enjoying the new setup.
56 books down, 10 to go.
3 student teachings down, 0 to go.
who-knows-how-many tests down, 2 more plus a giant paper to go.
