Bringing a family of seven out of a typical american lifestyle and planting them in community living within a strange culture is a more difficult transition than I anticipated. Not impossible, but it definitely has its challenges. I won’t bore you with the minor intricacies of our day to day life, but I will say that this is not for everyone.
Our family has been adjusting well, but there are some things that we are happy to say are only temporary. We do recognize that things will be different when we leave Mexico in August and head to Honolulu for the next five months. At least there the culture and language will be normal. (normal for us, anyway!)
That being said, Tijuana is growing on us. I have to admit that when we first arrived, we all had a certain amount of anxiety about being here. Let’s face it, this city doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being a safe place to live, especially for a bunch of blonde haired, blue eyed kids. But we had a definite call from God to come here for this season, so we obeyed, and here we are, two and a half months into our 5 month stay.
The Lord has been using our time here. Beth and I have been able to minister to a lot of people on base, and in the community. The Mexican people are extremely easy to share the gospel with. Most of them are Catholic, so they have a knowledge and respect for the things of God. They are easy to engage and open to hear the good news of Christ.
The lecture phase of our DTS is over in two weeks. Then the outreach phase begins. I’ll give you a quick rundown on the agenda.
Outreach phase is 10 weeks long. Sometime during the first few weeks, we will spend a week in Fremont, CA. It’s a suburb of San Francisco in which there are 70,000 muslim immigrants. There are several local churches along with teams from various YWAM bases that have a mission to go door to door through those neighborhoods, and get a Bible into every Muslim home. I’m looking forward to working with them to bring the gospel to these people!
The other 9 weeks will be spent here in Tijuana and Rosarito, working with local pastors and ministries.
There is also one other possibility for us. Half of our DTS class is going to Nepal and India. They needed to fill in two weeks of time in India, so I connected them with Josh. Josh is the pastor who has hosted our teams since 2007. I have written about him before after each of the India trips in the past. So it looks like they will be spending a couple of weeks with him. Beth and I have prayed about taking the kids there, and we are waiting to see if the Lord will open that door for us to meet them and spend a couple weeks in India.
Last weekend we took the kids to LA to spend the night in a hotel and get away or a bit. It had been three weeks since we had a family day because we were so busy with ministry and work duties. But Saturday, we went to Huntington Beach to do some open air preaching and street witnessing with Ray Comfort and Stuart Scott. Then they invited us to a barbecue that evening. It was really great to reconnect with some of the other staff at Living Waters that we have not seen face to face for about 7 years.
We are planning another trip up to LA within the next couple of weeks to bring a small team from the base and model some street witnessing techniques for them. We are trying to get other people fired up for evangelism! So please pray that we succeed in that. We could just as easily do it here, but something about spending a day in LA is a lot more attractive to people.
Thanks for all of your love and prayers. We are so blessed to have a family of believers behind us in this ministry!
Our family with Ray and Scotty. These two are great evangelists.
