Completing a Season

First of all we want to thank all of you who have faithfully prayed and supported us over the last 4 or 5 years. God has done so much in our lives not to mention the fruit we know has came from OUR labor.

We have realized that our time in Brazil has come to an end we are at the end of a season ready for another. The bottom line we are here in Brazil learning to be missionaries, growing as a family our hearts grow more burdened for those who don’t have access to the gospel.

Many of you know our purpose in looking at starting an English school was 2 sided. One, to be more self sufficient. We find a growing desire to be missionaries as a part of the community not as people entirely supported from the outside. Second was to see the establishment of a business here as a path to one day opening a business in a more closed country, where missions can not be openly practiced or even talked about. Returning from our visit with family and church in the US we were able to weigh the ability of an English school to accomplish both those objectives. The first objective is something that I am sure with much hard work, an investment of time and finances we could achieve. The second perhaps, however we have become increasingly doubtful of the necessity and efficiency. In the end  this is a much more long term investment than we are willing to make. Brazil is a highly Christian nation with an ever growing church. This is awesome, we love Brazil, it’s people and that they are becoming one of the great missionary sending nations in the world but our heart is to the unreached.

We moved to Rio because our children were showing some ill affects of the frontier we were living on, they needed a time for them and still do. In light of this I will be enrolling in college and hopefully with God’s help earn a civil engineering, agriculture or education degree. My desire is to have more international employability and the skills so desperately needed in places like Corumba, Puerto Suarez Bolivia, refuge camps who knows. This will give us more access to the parts of the world growing in our hearts. It will also require less time and investment while allowing our kids a chance to get a good education.

We are not leaving missions, missionaries is something that we are, not a job we do. We are moving forward, going deeper and adding skills to the development God has been doing in us. We ask those who support us to stick with us for a time, phase out over 6 months to a year. We aren’t closed to long term help and support may or may not be a part of our future but understand this is always a free will process. The direction we are going is definitely to be more self supported but God will certainly use His body to help us on the way.

We are still seeking God for direction as to where we will live. Obviously our home body of WCC would be a great support, loving body and a joy to be around. As we believe we are being lead to continue in missions through the process, both on a college campus and perhaps to an unreached people. We plan to head to Oregon soon for a time to decompress and communicate in person. While there we will finish evaluating our options for life with kids, college and our long term missions desires. We are looking for an area we can begin to learn Arabic and study their culture, somewhere that has a significant Middle Eastern or North African population. We appreciate all the questions you must have but ask patience as we need to finish this before we can give a hard answer as to where, when, how. We will continue to blog through this process in the same unique open way, letting you into our thoughts, ideas, success and failure.

Pray for us as we sell our things, pack, prepare to say goodbye to a country that has become home. Pray especially for our kids as their spiritual life and education are big factors in this decision. Pray that God leads the steps and that we remain submissive to him throughout this process. Pray for timing, we are looking for tickets around the beginning of April but this could change.

We can’t thank you enough and plan to continue sharing our story and what God is teaching us along the way. God bless and keep you all,

 

 

Ben and family