A lot to update on

Hey everybody,

It has been a while.  Just wanted to let you know we are still here :-).  There has been a lot that has happened since our last post 7 months ago (Wow, really 7 months? How is that possible?).  Well here is a video that we made to show what all has happened this past year.  We hope you enjoy!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLAvrKinZzE

Busy Summer

Hello everyone,

Our summer here has been very busy.  We have had 3 YWAM outreach teams come here to help back to back in the month of July.  Thanks to the help of the outreach teams, we were able to run 2 different kids camps for 2 different churches.  The outreach teams also helped a lot by advertising for our Rock Cafe.  They would go around to different parts of the city and hand out flyers advertising for us.

Here is a link that a friend from one of the churches made from the English camp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDA1ZvbMr7Y

English camp the Kona team ran

Outreach teams help draw a lot of people to our Rock Cafe

We had all the kids come to the Rock Cafe for the afternoon

Down to the last two in musical chairs

This is how the outreach teams get around the city

Nap time for the kids :)

It is really nice having somebody lead worship for us

Family News:
Next time we update this blog, we will be able to share with you about Elliot's first day of school!  It seems so crazy that he will be starting school on August 31.  He still seems too little :) Please pray for his transition, since he doesn't speak Chinese yet.  Also, it has been confirmed by our doctor that the baby inside Magan's belly is in fact a girl :) YAY!  We are very excited and can't wait till she gets here in November!

The Rock Cafe is open!!!!

These last couple months have been really busy here!  If you haven't seen our updates on Facebook, we have found a location for our Rock Cafe!!  The first floor will be our cafe.  The second floor will be used for English classes.  The third floor will have our office.  We feel so blessed to have finally found a place where we can do the ministry that we feel like God has called us here to do.  We spent around 4-6 weeks getting it ready.  We were working on it up until a few hours before opening :).  The word is slowly getting out about our cafe.  Mainly friends are passing it on to other friends and even bringing people in. Here are some pictures of the whole process.

Street view - it is 4 floors

A DTS team painted some free desks and chairs

We hand sanded all the free wood that we used to make our tables

Prepping the walls for paint

Everything but the chairs were made from recycled pallet wood

Our first night!

     

     A Friend painted this tree for us

Overall getting the Rock ready was a lot of work but we feel blessed to finally be up and running.  We had some much needed help from  two YWAM staff from Montana that helped us for an entire month.  Also a DTS team from Taipei came and helped for a week.  These groups of people had committed to coming to help us, but for a long time we'd been unable to find a place.  We signed the contract within a week of the DTS team's arrival. God had perfect timing!

A Cool story:

 Magan and one of our fellow staff members are involved in teaching a baking class for our church staff.  They run a coffee shop for evangelism and wanted to start selling baked goods there. Recently, they decided to start using the baking class as an opportunity to invite nonbelievers to learn how to bake with the hopes of sharing the gospel. Two weeks ago we had 2 high school senior girls join the class.  The next day, our church members invited the girls to their coffee shop and they shared the gospel with them there.  Our pastor sent Keith a text that day saying that the girls decided to follow Jesus that day!  This is so exciting for us because we were hoping to be able to partner with local churches in this way.  On Sunday the pastor was thanking us for having the baking class, but we said "No thank you for sharing the gospel!" God is so good!

Family News:

Many of you probably have heard that Magan is pregnant.  Here in Taiwan, they go for a doctor visit every month (it only costs us 3 USD every time).  So at our last visit the doctor informed us that we are having a........GIRL!!!  We are very excited, but at the same time we are kind of waiting till our next visit to hear a confirmation, because they said Ezra was a girl too, haha!

Few things that have been happening

Since we have arrived here in our new city we have been spending a lot of time walking around and getting to know our knew location.  It has been interesting to observe the differences from Taipei, and we have also used the opportunity to look for a location for our future English ministry.  We have not found a location yet, but we feel like we may be getting close.  It has proved to be more difficult then we had originally hoped because rent here is much more expensive then we had been told. Also, some of the buildings were in such poor condition that it would have cost way too much money to get it functional.

If you look closely you can see his scars from getting firecrackers thrown at him

Something interesting happened while we were walking around the city.  The night before this particular day, Biggie (team member from Zambia), and Keith went to check out a local festival.  They knew beforehand that it would be very loud and very crowded.  This festival is considered one of three most important Chinese New Year festivals and many locals and foreigners will show up to watch the spectacle.  The main event is when a man stands on a big chair-like thing with long handles and people carry him around.  He is chosen to represent a god named Master Han Dan and they then throw firecrackers at him. This god is thought to be the god of wealth and is afraid of the cold, so they throw the firecrackers to keep him warm while praying for good wealth in the coming year. Well, the day after we attended this event we were walking around a different part of the city and met the man that was representing Master Han Dan.  So we took advantage of this opportunity and talked to the man for a little while.

Picture courtesy of Google images

                                              Video of the bombing of Master Han Dan

We have just recently had a team from the Montana YWAM base come here and help us by building bunk beds in our outreach house.  This was a huge blessing for us because now we will have a place for outreach teams to sleep.  They also fixed our tile floor that was busted from a previous tenant.  They worked very hard and finished so quickly that we were able to take them around to see our beautiful city.

Beds are Awesome!

Family News:  Elliot has recently started going to a English evening school every Wednesday night.  It is only for an hour.  The family who runs the school are friends of ours and Elliot is good friends with their daughter.  The purpose of the school is to teach English but we thought it would be good for Elliot to be around other kids in a school environment and also get used to hearing Chinese.  He is the only boy in a class of 5.

Elliot working his magic :-)

February

We just finished celebrating Chinese New Year here in Taiwan.  We had a BBQ with friends and also took advantage of the down time to unpack more boxes :).  We just recently made a video of our move to Taidong so click below if you would like to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUJ6UTfwkwY

In the next two weeks we hope to make a decision about a location for our new English cafe.  Please pray for us that we make a wise decision.

The start of a new ministry

Moving chaos

Well, we have recently moved to a new location in Taiwan and are starting a new ministry in YWAM.  This is probably the biggest transition that either one of us have ever made in ministry.  We are no longer working with an already established ministry but are now starting everything from scratch.


Saying Goodbye to all of our friends in the Taipei area was difficult for us.  We had our last meals with different friends and were able to say goodbye to our English class that we taught for around four years.  The meal that we had with our Advanced English was the most meaningful for us because we have spent a lot of time with them over the years and they really mean a lot to us.  They each to took a moment to share kind words, special memories, and encouragement with us and even gave us gifts to remember them by.  We were so blessed and we will miss them dearly.

Our English class

A needed coffee after a very long couple days of moving

This last 2 weeks have been a lot of work. We had to change our address on all our bills, pack up our old house, load everything up on 4 rented trucks, drive 7 hours, and then unpack everything in the new location.  Now that we are in our new city, we have had to figure out a lot of little details that we never had to do in our other city. (we always moved into previously rented YWAM apartments.) for example, how to get gas hooked up to our stove, so that we could cook (we just got it today! Praise God).  We still have to figure out where we can buy all the things we like to eat.  We are feeling pretty tired, but are excited to start looking for a location for our English cafe that we plan to start in April.  It will be an extension of the Rock Cafe in Taipei that we have been working at for the last 5 years.

Our boys are doing really well now.  When we first moved, they were not handling the transition well.  They would cry and wake in the middle of the night and ask to go home.  It was hard for everybody, but we worked hard to make them feel more at home, and they have since been able to settle down.

The boys helping to get the house ready

We are currently trying to collect all the pictures that other people took from the moving process.  So we hope to put together a short video of the whole experience.  Many of our YWAM friends helped with the move and we are so grateful.  It was a lot of work and we couldn't have done it alone.

 This week we are hosting a DTS outreach from our home base in Taipei.  They are at the end of their two month outreach.  We feel blessed to have them here with us because they are going to be helping us clean and paint our outreach house.  It is in need of some TLC, and after they are finished it will be in better shape for hosting future teams.  

Quick and Current News (65 second read) :)

Hello everybody,

We are very sorry it has been so long since we updated last and for that we apologize.  Things have been very busy here and it has been hard to do update you on what is going on.

We wanted to update you on three brief things:

1) Keith just finished the School of Frontier Missions.  He really enjoyed this school.  It was a very practical school and he feels like he has an even bigger heart for frontier missions.  We will probably write more about this experience in the future.

2) We bought a car!!!  Unfortunately the car we originally wanted to buy did not work out, but we were able to find another within our budget.  We really want to thank everybody for your generosity.  We would not have been able to buy this car without all of you partnering with us.  We feel very blessed by everyone and are so thankful for this vehicle. The kids have more space and also love the new car. Elliot always asks, "Are we going in the new car?"

3) This week Keith is going along with a few people from our TaiDong team down to TaiDong for 4 days.  They will be taking a film crew from Montana to do interviews and film different places in the area.  They are doing this to put together promotional videos.  Montana has partnered with Taiwan Ministries for the next three years in what they are calling a "Surge"(Please click the link below for more details on what the Surge is).  While Keith is in TaiDong, he will be looking for a house for us to live in.  So if you think of us, please pray for him while he looks for a place and also for safety while traveling.

http://vimeo.com/108255853