19 kids are pre-registered and we have about 15 adults (mostly the parents but a few others) helping to pull it all together.  The kids are “bouncing-off-the-walls excited” and can’t wait to get there.  I think for some this is definitely a highlight of their year and probably of all their years as MKs.

We’re all looking forward to great times together…faith-building, life-building, and Christ-uplifting!  Pray with us for God to accomplish His purposes for this event in all of our lives and for safety for everyone (some are traveling from several hours away; last year a boy fell and had a badly broken nose!).

Camp ends around noon on Saturday. We should have pics and stories to tell over the next few days!

THANKS FOR PRAYING!

It’s not like the chilly, breezy, and rainy weather we used to call spring back in the USA, but we still call it spring.  It may last for a couple weeks and at some unpredictable moment, we’ll see highs in the 90s and lows in the upper 50s or lower 60s.  That weather might show up in 2 or 3 weeks but generally shows up in March at some point.  When it does, we’ll call that “summer” or maybe “hot season.”  Winter, spring and part or most of summer are generally all lumped into what we call “dry season” when it typically doesn’t rain much, if at all.  Of course, it rained a good bit here in the first 2 weeks of February which was atypical.  When it’s summer in the USA, it’s typically rainy and a bit cooler here but still warm.  We’ll call that “rainy season.”  Except, some rainy seasons it never really rains so it just stays hot and dry which is more like hot season but still it’s summer.  We have a fall but I don’t know when that is.  I guess that’s October.

Got it?!?

Yeah…me neither!

After not having a working electric meter since some time in early August, and after several attempts to get the electricity commission (CFE) to actually take our request for a replacement and finally getting them to do so after a month of trying, and after waiting for 6 months for them to actually replace the broken meter which they didn’t do until after we went in AGAIN to tell them they still hadn’t acted on it, we have FINALLY received our bill for all the undocumented power usage for those months.

We figured it wouldn’t be too accurate since we were all gone for 2+ months with everything unplugged.  We were right in thinking they wouldn’t take that into consideration.  They didn’t.

However, since they were so bad about actually taking our work order in the first place, they probably missed about a month of non-payment at the front-end.  So, all-in-all, it seemed to turn out about right.  Less than I expected, but I was expecting to get gouged a bit.  It’s hard to really figure, but I think we probably ended up paying less than if the meter had been working all along.

Praise God for that!  I don’t think we’ve ever heard of anyone ever getting a situation like this to work in their favor here in Mexico.  It’s a minor miracle!

We’ll put the little extra we saved aside for future spikes in our utility bills.  They happen from time to time, unexpectedly, and it’s nice to have a little cushion set aside just for that contingency.

~ Nate Saint

Ironically, most of us probably know the statement by Nate Saint’s co-worker, Jim Elliot:

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”  (see here for a scanned image of this quote in Elliot’s own handwriting)

Again, I see no real need  for adding my own ramblings to such simple yet profound statements by two saints (pun intended) who not only wrote and spoke of great faith, but who lived and died by such words and by such faith.

I’m certainly not qualified to speak after these men of faith and action.  But of course, you knew I would!

If I may make one simple observation, and perhaps, if I could have conversed in person with Nate Saint, I might have ventured to mention to him that it is not only “people who do not know the Lord” who may question why anyone would waste his or her life as a missionary, I’m very sorry to add, that even among supposed Christians, this same question sometimes comes up.  May it never be!  I’m afraid it sometimes is true.

May God help us to see the world and our few breaths here in it as He sees them and may we be men and women of faith who are indeed, no fools.

For example, in a house church meeting a person might be thinking in English to say that we once lived on the same street as some friends being mentioned in a prayer request, but what comes out in Spanish is that our friends and we lived on the street…together.

Of course, that’s just an example. I’m not saying that I said that…and I’m not saying that I didn’t either.

Yesterday, we finally decided to go in and pay our third bill since the meter’s demise, and also to see if we could talk to someone about this tardy repair order.  Fortunately, there were no other customers in the waiting area (I’ve seen it filled with people in the past).  So, a man looked up our order number on the computer there and he grumbled a bit at the screen.  Apparently, the order was put in as “meter needing inspected for replacement.”  That was correct.  Unfortunately, what that also meant was the inspector never came. This man was not happy with the inspector.

So, he edited a change to the order calling it, “BROKEN, NEEDS REPLACED ASAP.”  He told us a repairman would come first thing in the morning to replace it.  At 11:30 a.m. sharp, the repairman came, and in fewer than 10 minutes, he had the new meter installed and he was gone.

The official at the office also said yesterday that they would have to go back and give us an updated billing on a pro rata basis.  That will be the thing we now hold our breath over.  Not that they’ll take a long time to send it, but that we have no idea what amount they will assign to our unknown quantity of electricity used.

Unfortunately, we were gone for over 2 months and other than the lady who came a couple times a week to dust and clean and check on the house, there was no real electricity usage.  No appliances were plugged in.  In fact, the only thing plugged in were the phones just to keep the batteries from failing.  Other than that, only the lights used for a few hours each week represented the total electricity usage for about 11 weeks.  We’ll no doubt be billed as if we used the electricity under normal usage for those weeks.

Can we complain if/when they do?  Oh, I suppose.  However, we’ve been told by others who’ve gone through something similar with the CFE that they really aren’t flexible and when they send out a bill, they don’t entertain negotiations.  Of course, you don’t have to pay it.  They will simply shut off your electricity until you do.  That’s basically the coming situation.  We sure hope they don’t come up with a ridiculous figure.  If it’s truly pro rata, I think we have set aside enough to cover it…over $1,000 USD.

We did pay 3 very small bills (bi-monthly) during this time.  One of the two actually showed a teeny increase in usage over the previous one!  The meter hadn’t even moved…I guess it was the angle at which the meter was read!

On the lesser bright side…our landlord also informed us yesterday that he needs to raise the rent a thousand pesos for next month.  That’s about an extra $80 a month.  Oh joy!  We’re not complaining, legally, he can raise the rent 10% every year.  Had he done that since the beginning (and he has not), we’d already be paying be paying almost 30% more each month than we will be with our newly increased rent.   Like I said, we can’t complain.  We probably would have moved had it gone up to the legally allowable amount.

You probably have no idea what moving would mean…we probably don’t either!  The library is so large it could easily take up most of the living area of the homes in which most of our co-workers are living.  It would be hard to find an affordable home that would support the library space needed.  I’ve sometimes thought we’d have to move into two houses side-by-side in order to pull it off!  We just might have to do that eventually.  Of course, then Beth’s mom would have to find a new place to live too.  It’s complicated!

Thanks to the Lord for providing for our daily bread and for the other basic needs of a roof over our heads (which He often did not have) and electricity to run our lives in this technological age (which He never had)!

~ Vance Havner

This morning I was looking over Bethie’s shoulder as she perused the morning news via the Internet.  I noticed that the person highlighted in the article had spent some time in her career as a “motivational speaker.”

Those two words stuck with me this morning.  I thought about how the church has “motivational speakers.”  There are speaking circuits for such eloquent and inspiring talkers.  Thousands of listeners perpetually fill grand halls designed for mass aural absorption of singular orations.  It is not that these orations aren’t good necessarily.  There is certainly a place for encouraging, exhorting, and admonishing believers.

Havner was on to a biblical truth in his statement above.  It comes from James 1.

¹⁹ Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. ²⁰ Human anger does not produce the righteousness^[h] God desires. ²¹ So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls.  ²² But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.

I believe James is teaching us that we don’t need a church full of motivational speakers, but we DO need the church to be filled with 100% “motivational listeners.”  We need to ALL be quick to listen to God’s Word and to “accept the word God has planted in [our] hearts.”  For it is easy to reject it.

James is teaching us that we also must not merely be “motivational listeners” of God’s Word but ultimately “motivational doers” of it.

That’s what I think Havner was getting at.

Our churches all too often are centered around motivational speaking (whether that be a “special speaker” or simply “the preacher”).  What the church needs is simply doers of the Word.  What motivational speaking would we need if we all simply were doers of the Word?

Of course, the church was given “pastors and teachers” as spiritual gifts.  It is not as though we do not need them.  Christ knows best.  We do need them.  However, note the goal of all spiritual gifts as described in Ephesians 4:

 ¹¹ Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. ¹² Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. ¹³ This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. ¹⁴ Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. ¹⁵ Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ,who is the head of his body, the church. ¹⁶ He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.

May we all be “motivational hearers” of God’s Word which leads us to be “motivational doers” as well.  Sometimes the speaker needs to be the listener and the doer more so than the audience!

Of course, in writing this, I am proving my own point!

Grace and peace to you today as you DO the Word of God in everything you do and may we grow to become more and more like Christ this very day.

Well, I prefer my lady to have the flower arrangement she really likes, not the pathetic arrangement that I would have picked out.

Perk #10,458 for living in Mexico: this arrangement ON Valentine’s Day cost less than $20 (and all the guys out there know how UNIMPORTANT price is for such things…but I still wanted to mention it…lol)

Speaking of price…there is no quantity of money in the whole-wide world that compares to the love I have for “mi amor.”  I love you Beth!

I think the song below illustrates my point…you may want to grab a box of tissues before viewing.

~ Reinhard Bonnke

Hard to add any thoughts to this very obvious truth.  Jesus said if you love me, you will obey me.  James said what good is faith if you don’t have works born out of that faith?  Seeking God’s will and simply living it out can be two distinct things.  At times, “seeking God’s will” can be a cloak for our unwillingness to do it.  May it never be.

A few years ago I had a final earthly meeting with a precious saint, Toni Nobles.  She and her husband helped disciple me as a teenager.  The one thing she taught me that I will never forget is the need to and power of memorizing Scripture.  I have not met or heard of anyone else in the whole world who memorized more of God’s Word than this career housewife with a simple high school diploma.  Toni was not deeply educated in the classrooms of universities and seminaries.  She was, however, deeply educated by a profound depth of training by the Holy Spirit through His Word faithfully hidden in her heart.

When I first met Toni she was already retired and in her 60′s.  I’ll never forget the awe of hearing from her how she was challenged to memorize Scripture some years before as she lay in a hospital room on her back for an entire year due to an accident.  A friend visited her and challenged her to hide God’s Word in her heart.  Toni was reluctant stating that she couldn’t memorize Scripture.  Her friend wouldn’t accept that answer and proceeded to give her some simple tips on memorizing: word by word, phrase by phrase, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book.  That simple.

Toni didn’t know where to start but her friend encouraged her to start memorizing a book of the Bible that Toni treasured most.  At that time in a discouraging hospital room, she chose the book of Psalms which she said gave her much peace and comfort.

I remember thinking at this point in the story that Toni could not have ever memorized the entire book of Psalms.  I was right.  She told me she was no where close to doing so after her year in the hospital, but she continued working on it for four years after leaving that hospital bed.  After 5 years and countless hours of work, she DID finish memorizing the Psalms.  OK, so I was wrong!

She told me that the repetition involved in memorizing such a quantity of Scripture caused her to know the book so well that she could recite the entire book from verse 1:1 to 150:6 verse by verse forward AND also from 150:6 to verse 1:1 verse by verse in backward order!  She really did know the Psalms backwards and forwards!

I lost track of Toni and her husband after I left Florida for college in 1985, and I didn’t see John again.  About 10 years ago I discovered that Toni was in a nursing home in my parents’ town and that John had died a few months before.  We went to visit her there a few times before learning several years ago that she left this world for her Shepherd’s arms.

In one of our last visits with Toni I asked her if she had memorized more than just the Psalms and Proverbs and Matthew and Romans (which I knew she had completed years before).

She replied, “I finished memorizing the New Testament and then the Lord led me to memorize the Minor Prophets which I did.”  (yes, all 12 of them!)

I asked her if she was memorizing anything else now.

She chuckled and said, “Oh no.  I’m through with my memory work.  If only I could live all that I know from God’s Word, I would do well.  I haven’t done that yet, so that’s what I’m working on now.”

…overrun by those who do it.

Jesus is the friend of a wounded heart.  I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have such a heart.  Do you know my friend Jesus?  He’s not only the friend of wounded hearts, but the healer of them too.  His heart was wounded too…just for you.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”

~ Psalm 147:3 (NKJV)