2 Timothy 1:7

God has not given you a spirit of fear but a spirit of love, power and a sound mind.

The kids at school sing a song about this verse. It has cheesy little moves and a catchy tune, but really the message is an important one.
As humans so many thing we do or don’t do is motivated by fear. Fear of rejection, fear of getting hurt, fear of humiliation. This should not be how we live our lives. We should be motivated by a love for God and a love for people, we should fearlessly do what God has for us!
 Step out today and do something that scares you! Maybe repeat this verse to yourself a couple of times, and then do it!

Walking Stick!

One of the most interesting critters out here in the bush is the walking stick. I remember seeing one in a zoo when I was a kid. But a couple of days ago there was one crawling around on the outside of our house!
You can read more on them here.

What happened with the truck.

So if we are facebook friends you may have heard about our truck being impounded by the government. Here is the whole story.
We bought our truck in South Africa in 2010 before coming up to Namibia, we bought in SA because cars are much cheaper down there. But we before buying it we looked into what it would take to have a foreign car in Namibia. According to the officials we spoke to we had two choices, we could import the car to Nam, but it would cost 16.5% of the value of the car, or we could just pay a $30 fee every three months to keep it on the road. We opted for the second choice as we were not sure about importing it.
So for the last two years we have been getting a road permit every three months, or sometimes a little bit more if we forgot to renew it.
When the CCCB team was visiting we took them out to Hero’s acre to look out at the city and to pray for the city of Windhoek. It was on Easter weekend. To get to hero’s acre one has to leave the city, and there are police stops at all the entrances to Windhoek.
David, the two professors, Reese, and I were in the front and the five students were on the back. As we were coming back into the city we were pulled off by the police. Apparently they were pulling all cars with foreign license plates off to check their papers. They only do this on Easter and Christmas weekend.
David confidently pulled out the permit and he was told, “um, no, get out and come with me.” While he went off to explain what was going on we stayed in the car. We have been pulled over at the police stop several times before and it had never been a big deal. After a while Mr. Williams looked back at me and said “They are not buying what he is trying to sell.” After a few more minutes David came to the window and said that they were going to impound the car, and we needed to find taxi’s to get home. This would have been impossible since it was a holiday weekend, and we were way out of the city. Plus if we were lucky enough to find a taxi the driver may be drunk, as it is a holiday weekend. There was no way we were going to put Reese in a taxi. At this point he woke up from a nap and he started crying really loudly. So I got out of the car and stood next to the police officer. They felt sorry for us, and said that they would follow us back to the house and then take he car from there.
They said that we were supposed to pay the import tax, even if we were not importing the car. And then if we ever left Namibia we could request to get it back. We also needed to pay a fine for not paying the tax sooner. I guess the different offices of government do not have the same rules. The rules we were following were set out by the roads authority, and the import tax rule is set by the ministry of finance. So we made the mistake of only asking one office what the rules are…
They followed us to our house and then David drove the truck to the impound lot. When they got to the lot they had impounded so many cars that they had run out of the forms that they needed so David had to drive with them to Okahandja to get the forms and then back to the impound lot. During this long drive David was able to strike up a good conversation with the officers and they decided to give him a lift back home, so no one needed a taxi! David also now has made some contacts with people in the government, and we have an agreement that they will come to our house for coffee some time in the future 🙂

In the following week we had to do a lot of running around and scrambling to get everything done that needed to be done and to get the money together. We needed to get three quotes on the value, the government then used that to calculate the tax. Then we had to hire a clearing agent to file the paper work. And we had to get the cash together. It ended up costing us $1400 to get our Hasselhof out of jail. This money came out of our furlough fund, we hope to make up some of that when we are back home.

It was really stressful and all that, but in the end we were able to make friends with the police officers, and we learned a lesson about trusting in God.

An old post.

I wrote this post a little over a month ago. When we found out that a house was available for us on the YWAM base. I never got around to finishing it and posting it. So here you go!

Some exciting news for us…
We are moving!

We have been living in a house in town for the last two years, but in the last few weeks an opportunity to move onto the YWAM base has come to light. After much prayer and consideration it seems like the best option for us right now.
The YWAM base is 20km outside of town, and it is a farm on a huge piece of land. Currently there are about 6 families living on the base and several singles. There are people from America, South Africa, Holland, Zambia, and Namibia. 
The biggest reason we want to move out there is to be part of the community of people that we will be working with. David and I have always felt that we should be part of a team, and work in a team setting so this is a way for us to work more closely with the team of people who are already working in Katutura.
The house is a fixer upper, so we will spend a few weeks before moving on replacing ceilings and painting. It should be fun though.
The house has three bedrooms so it is bigger than any place we have stayed in.
These are some pictures I took while the people on the base were still getting some of their furniture out.

Keep your eyes on this space for updates on the home improvements.

What is going on?

We moved out to the YWAM base a few weeks ago, it is out in the gramadullas, so there is limited internet access out here. We are still alive, and very very busy! I am working on some blog posts that I hope to be able to post this week. We are doing great, planning for furlough, looking for plane tickets, and finishing off at CHS.
Reese is doing great also, he is growing and thriving! Look out for a four month post soon too!

SO MUCH NEWS!

So much has happened in the last few weeks! We moved, we are renovating the new (old) place, and we are hosting a team from CCCB.
We took the plunge a about 4 weeks ago and asked Brian if there was any houseing available on the YWAM base, he said that there was, and that he would love to have us move out here. So before we knew it we were throwing things in boxes and making the 20km drive to our new home. Before we could move in though we had to tear the ceilings out of three of the rooms since they were so full of bat poop the smell made my eyes water. We have been in the new place for 13 days now and we are still slowly unpacking. I think I should do a separate post explaining why we felt we should move out here.

The more exciting news for right now is that we have been playing hosts to a CCCB missions team this last week. When we were students at Central we used to lead mission trips once a year to different African countries, we always hoped that we would be able to be on the receiving end of such a team, and now we are! The team has two professors and five students. We have had so much fun with them here, and we have been able to share our lives here in Namibia with them. They have been amazing, ready to jump in and help with anything and we have stayed up way too late on most nights talking and laughing. I have been intending to do a daily blog of what they have been up to, and I still hope to do that. There has been too many great things to try and squish into one blog!

In not so fun news, the government detained our car yesterday. We seem to have been given incorrect information on how to keep a vehicle that is registered in South Africa here in Namibia. We will have to wait for the long weekend to end, and then we will have to try and figure out how to get it back. It looks like it is going to cost a lot of money.

Please pray for the team as their visit here is drawing to a close, and today they will be doing children’s ministry with over 50 kids. Also pray for us as we get settled into the new place, and of course for the whole car situation.

Reese is doing great too!

A thousand gifts.

It has been a while since I last did a thousand gifts post, I am only up to number 72, oops! I guess things have been kind of hectic the last few months 🙂
If you don’t remember what these posts are about, it is listing a thousand things that God has given you that you are thankful for.  You can click on the link on the left for more info.

73. Reese.
74. Skype
75. Facebook
76. The rain, there needs to be some more of it though!
77. The few hours of sleep that we do get 😉
78. I am thankful for the next chapter in our lives. It is going to be an exciting year!

At three months!

At three months Reese is thriving, and growing faster than I thought possible. His adjusted age is only a month and a few weeks, but he seems to be on par with other three month olds, he is just maybe a little smaller. Reese weighs in at 12 pounds and is almost 24 inches long.

 

Three measures in 10 years.

“The kingdom of God is like yeast that a women used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast into three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough.”
Matt 13:33

In 2002 David and I met on the YWAM base here in Namibia. He was in the middle of a church plant in the North, and after the DTS school we both attended I went up to the North with him to help establish that ministry. It was during that time that I felt called to missions in Africa, and that David and I fell in love and realized we had the same goals. In 2005 we finally made it to Bible college to prepare ourselves better for a life in ministry, specifically cross cultural ministry. We graduated with top honors in 2009.
In 2010 we finally made it back to Namibia to begin the work we had felt called to do in 2002. But they don’t just hand out visas for anyone who wants to come and work in Namibia. So we agreed to spend two years (those two years will be coming to an end at the end of April) working with John and Suzanne at Community Hope School while getting a new ministry in the works and in return they would let us use CHS for visa purposes.
 The last two years have been fun, exciting, trying, exhausting, and a million other things. I think that perhaps we felt at times that the two years were dragging by as we were chomping at the bit to begin the ministry we had been working towards. But as I look back now I know that these last two years have been invaluable. We have grown and learned more than I could put down here. God has used these last two years as a time to refine us as people, and as a family. We have had some very rough and sad times, but we have also celebrated great victories, including new births!
 He has also used this time to bring the plan and work He has for us here into focus. And above all we have had two years immersed in the community that we will be reaching out to, under the covering of another ministry. This has given us an opportunity to get to know the people, make mistakes, learn, and make relationships without having our names on the line. Does that make sense? If we had just jumped in with our own thing without this knowledge and relationships we would have fallen flat on our faces 🙂

So now in 2012, exactly ten years after we met and felt the call, we are ready to announce and start a new ministry here in Namibia.It is an amazing feeling to be at the point we have been working towards!
 Brian and Pam Kinghorn, the directors of YWAM Namibia, have welcomed us with open arms. So we will be working under the covering of YWAM. YWAM currently has two main ministries in Namibia. CHS and Beautiful kids (BK). CHS you know about, Beautiful kids is an outreach to preschool aged kids primarily, but they also have youth programs, after school programs, teacher training, classes on how to be a good parent, and they have a sewing project that is creating jobs for women in the community. Our ministry will come along side these two and complement what they are doing. Our ministry will have two parts.

Bear with me, I know this post is getting long…

The first part of the ministry will be focused in Katutura, for now we will be working out of the BK offices.
Our ministry is based on the verse at the start of this post. We believe that if the Kingdom of God is present in a community it’s reach is unlimited. It should not only transform a part of that community. But it reaches into every aspect of the community, the physical, the social and the spiritual. We are calling those three parts of society the three measure, and that will also be the name of our ministry! Three measures will exist to bring change to the physical, social, and spiritual lives of people in Katutura Namibia. We will begin with cell groups in people’s homes, skills training so people can get jobs, and activities for the men of the community especially. You can read more about the specifics in the ministry tab on the left hand side.

The second part of our ministry will be in the North of Namibia. This is where David worked when he was here before in 2002. We will be going up to the rural village areas of the country to train local Christian leaders. We will spend 2-3 weeks in the area three times a year doing what we are calling “Restoration Seminars.” You can also read more about those in the 3Measures tab on the left hand side.

Our official launch date is August 2012, we will be in the USA for a furlough and support raising trip from May through July.

God is great, and He is so good to us. Join with us in prayer and celebration as we end our time with CHS and launch a brand new ministry.

Prayer!

What are some of your prayer requests? We are going to spend some time in the coming weeks in prayer for the next step in our ministry, and would love to pray for you too.