A Home

It’s nice to have a home.  I actually get to leave my shampoo & conditioner IN the shower when I get out now! (This is Abby by the way. Nathan doesn’t use shampoo, or conditioner for that matter!) We are finally settled in an apartment here in California. I have never lived in a city before but so far its pretty cool.  Sure, you can hear the people upstairs vacuum their rug 3 times a day (I’m not exaggerating, we think they must be germ-a-phobes!) & I can calculate when the next ice cream truck will drive by with its bell ringing, even at 11pm when all good little children should be in bed, but there are great things about it too, like being across the street from an awesome grocery store that has amazing produce sales every week.  This is a big “yay” for us since we have been juicing a lot & it can get really expensive without good resources for fruit and veggies. Thank you Lord for nutritious green drinks! Thanks Lord also for so much free furniture off of craigslist!  We have pretty much everything we need & it doesn’t even look like it’s from my grandma’s basement either!  God has been very faithful.  Just to give an example of how cool God is, last week we went to pick up a bookshelf we found on craigslist.  The man who gave it to us needed some help moving a few things in his storage locker so as we helped him we got to know each other a little bit.  It turns out that he has started an outreach to the homeless community in the Los Angeles area & invited us to help out with it! We had just been talking about how we wanted to be involved in some sort of outreach, especially with the homeless! He was very interested in our plans to move to Indonesia as well. Along with him were an older Italian husband & wife & their daughter who were equally interested in our plans & offered us some things that we needed for our apartment. Who would have thought we would meet such cool people through a craigslist ad? We plan to help with the homeless outreach this Saturday passing out lunches to the people living in skid row.
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Ministry opportunities are already falling into our laps. Nathan gets up at 5am on Fridays in order to go to a discipleship Bible study at church.  It’s worth the early rise!  I get to sleep in a little longer on Tuesdays before I go to a women’s Bible study that has been a great chance to meet many ladies & learn together from God’s Word. On Thursdays we are taking a Missionary Epistles class at Eternity Bible College. It’s fun to be back in a classroom setting again, especially to study Romans & Galatians!  After class we join our Church college group for fellowship & study where we help lead one of the discussion groups.  This week we are attending an awesome ministry leaders seminar.  People from all over the world are attending this conference that is challenging us to train up church leaders in different countries to reach their own people.  We are excited to be a part of it since this is one of the goals we hope to attain through planting a church in Asia Pacific – Church leaders who will train up their own people to reach the surrounding people groups with the message they have heard!


Speaking of Asia Pacific, the most exciting news we have to share is that we are OFFICIALLY accepted to join the field of Asia Pacific!  We had a great Skype meeting with two of New Tribes Mission’s Asia Pacific’s field leaders yesterday & they let us know that they would love to have us join their team in Asia Pacific, so we have officially changed our status to “en-route” to the field!  It definitely gives us an extra dose of excitement to be one step closer to getting there. As most of you know, we hope to have the needed funds to leave for Indonesia in November of this year. We are praying that God would continue to bring people along that want to partner with us in taking the gospel to this country with so many needs.  Right now we are at 36% of the monthly finances we need to be able to go.  You can learn more about our finances & giving on the partners page, or if you are in the southern California area and would like to get together to hear more about our ministry plans then send us an email.  Thanks for reading, praying, & giving. You are very appreciated.
Because of Christ,
Nathan and Abby