Great Weekend Update

Sunday was a big day for us. We started out by driving up to Kent City to visit Red Pine Bible Church to present about our ministry. After some singing pastor Rick introduced us and gave us the floor. Rebecca opened by talking about how we came to this point; our previous trips and our call from God to go to Romania as full time missionaries. Mark then gave a bit of background on Romania and how it has been ravaged by communism and corruption. We then showed the H2H ministry video (which you can watch too, it is the "Orphans of Romania" video on the right sidebar of the blog). Then Mark explained what we will be doing once we're there and talked about some of the relationships we formed at summer camp last year. He read Elena's first letter to us after camp, where she thanked us for everything we did, like sitting with her for dinner, taking pictures with her, and letting her carry our backpack.

After church we talked with people and felt very warmly welcomed by many friendly people. Lots of people were interested and wanted to hear more about what we're doing. It was a great experience to be able to share our passion with them and it was great to see that they were excited about it too.

We then went to Mark's aunt's house for dinner and had a great time of fellowship with family. They prepared a great meal and had lots of snacks afterwards. We talked more about what we will be doing and showed more pictures of our previous trips. It was a lot of fun and we are very grateful for their hospitality.

Later that night after we had gone home the deacons along with Pastor Rick met to talk about what we had shared with them. They were very excited about our ministry and decided that they would like to partner in supporting us! They will be recommending this to the church and they will decide for sure by the end of the month. God is definitely at work here and this is an answer to prayers! Let's continue to pray that the recommendation goes through and that we can form a great partnership with the body of Christ at Red Pine Bible Church.

We had an open house while all this was going on and one couple came to look through our house. They said they really liked it and liked the lot and the country feel that we have here. They are just starting looking and are trying to decide if they want to invest this much into a house. Please pray with us that God will speak powerfully and clearly into their lives to lead them to buy our house. What a wonderful thing that would be!

Thanks so much for praying for and with us in these things. Your prayers are making a huge difference and we are so appreciative for your prayer partnership.

Church Partnership & Open House Prayer Requests

This weekend we have a couple of things going on that we would like to ask you to pray for with us.  On Sunday we will be sharing about our ministry at Red Pine Bible Church in Kent City. Mark's cousin Rick is the pastor there and we have been talking with him about partnering with his church.  We will have 25 minutes of the church service to share our vision with the congregation, what an honor!  We will first show a video of what H2H does and then we'll talk about our previous trips and what we'll be doing in our ministry.  We are very excited about this opportunity and are eagerly waiting to see how God will use it.  Would you please pray that:

-The Holy Spirit will anoint us and speak powerfully through us.

-God will speak to the hearts of the people there, firing up their passion for advancing His kingdom.

-For a close partnership to develop with this church body.

-For God to raise up people to be prayer and support partners.

Also this weekend we will be having an open house.  Would you please pray that God will send a buyer soon?

As we pray these things I would like to encourage you to meditate on one of my favorite Bible passages.  It is very reassuring for us since so many things are up in the air in our lives right now.  I hope that it will be an encouragement to you as well.

Phillipians 4:6-7  Don't worry about anything; instead pray about everything.  Tell God what you need, and thank Him for all He has done.  Then you will experience God's peace, which exceeds anything we can understand.  His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

1st Stages of Garden Growth

Our garden has been growing for two weeks now.  The beans, zucchini, and flowers have sprouted and the first leaves are up.  It is exciting to see the plants coming alive.

The flower of the rhubarb plant has continued to grow taller and is about done blossoming.  We have heard that the flower may make the rhubarb more bitter, but others say it does not.  We haven't harvested any yet, even though it is ready.  We have been waiting for the strawberries to be ripe so we can make strawberry rhubarb pie.  Yummy!

Here are the bean plants in different stages of sprouting.  We planted more beans than normal this year so hopefully this variety tastes really good.  

The first tomato!  It helps when you buy plants that are already blossoming :)

The bud of a pepper plant.  These are bell peppers and will be used to make red pepper hummus and other tasty things.

These are some flowers.  Not really sure what we planted, they were leftover seeds from a previous year.

Strawberry!  We have two different varieties of strawberries and the earlier variety is done blossoming and starting to bear fruit.  It won't be too much longer before we'll have to get out the row covers to protect the berries from the birds.  

There is nothing better than homegrown produce straight from the garden. The taste is amazing and you don't have to worry about e-coli or what toxins are on the produce. Gardening is also a chance to remind us about what is important.  In our own life we too need the proper nutrients, sunlight, water and to be free of weeds that threaten to choke us out.  It is a joy to see the wonder of God's amazing creation and stand in awe of His mighty works.

A Few Goodbyes

Today is the end of an era for us.  We just said goodbye to our two kitties, Smokey and Chewy. Since we are planning on moving to Romania we knew we needed to find a home for them so we've been asking around for quite a while.  Some people said we should put an ad on Craigslist, so we did yesterday thinking that it might take a few weeks to get a response.  Lo and behold we received an e-mail about 20 minutes after posting the ad.  Today we talked to the people who wanted to give our cats a loving home, and then they came to pick up our boys. We took some pictures before we said goodbye.

They definitely knew something was up, they were both slinking around and acting scared.

We'll miss you guys.

Awww!

Smokey says: I'm so cute, how can you get rid of me?

Chewy says: I don't want to go!  I'm hiding in the couch so you can't get me!

We also said goodbye to our nice car, the Camry.  We had promised Mark's brother Kevin that we would sell it to him before we left.  Kevin's car broke down and was having some serious issues so we decided to sell it to him now.  It was a great car and we really enjoyed having it.

Memorial Day Weekend

Memorial Day weekend has always been a special weekend for us and our families.  Usually we go camping with Rebecca's family and friends at Yankee Springs Campground.  We have camped there almost every year since we first met but this year was a lot different.  We instead filled the weekend with several different activities, all of which were very fun.  Friday we hung out with our friends Scott & Kayleen.  We played games, went to some garage sales, and watched Ocean's 11.  We had some awesome egg-rolls for dinner and brownies for dessert, mmm.

Saturday we headed up to Great Aunt Phil's cottage on Lake Michigan.  It was a little overcast but overall it was a nice day.  Rebecca's parents brought their camper and Mark helped set up.  We enjoyed some good food, usually on weekends like this there are lots of goodies and this was no exception.  We had a hamburger fry for dinner, and one of the dogs ate part of Grandma's hamburger right off her plate she was holding.  Fun times.

We went for a walk along the beach and Rebecca spotted this, a Bald Eagle.  It isn't every day that you get to see one of these so it was pretty exciting.

The cottage sits atop of the sand dune, so there are quite a few steps down to the beach.

We always enjoy seeing rays of sunshine.

There was lots of extra sand on the beach piled up because the water level is so high.  We saw many cool erosion patterns in the sand.

Sunday we took a walk, the weather was beautiful.  We relaxed the rest of the day and played some games.

Monday we went to the Essenburg get-together which happens every Memorial Day at Mark's late grandma's house.  We had a hotdog roast with potluck side dishes and enjoyed seeing lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins.  It was another beautiful day and a nice ending to the Memorial Day weekend.

Planting Our Garden

Ever since we have lived at our house we have enjoyed having our own garden.  This year we weren't planning on planting anything new because we thought we'd have sold our house by now.  Since we haven't had any bites on the house yet and we don't know when God will move we decided to go ahead and plant anyway.  The weather has been very nice lately and there hasn't been any frost for a while, so last week we went to it.

Since we don't own a rototiller and our garden isn't all that big, Mark decided to plow it up using an old fashioned wheel hoe.  It was hard work but was fun at the same time, and it was very satisfying to see how nicely it worked.

We planted lots of beans, as they are one of our favorite garden vegetables.  Mark dug rows and laid down some home-made compost.  Rebecca spread the seeds over the compost and then Mark spread another layer of compost over the rows.  Mark had made a compost box (which you can see in the first picture) a few years ago and we have been filling it with yard and kitchen waste.  It has turned into some very dark, rich soil that will really help the plants to grow.

We also planted three tomatoes, two bell peppers, two zucchini, some spinach, and lots of flowers.

This is one of our two rhubarb plants.  It has a huge flower stalk, something we've never seen before.

The rhubarb flower.

There are also lots of strawberries in the garden.  What started out as eight plants has spread out and they now take up over a quarter of the garden.  We are really looking forward to making some strawberry-rhubarb pies, Mark's favorite!

Some of our asparagus came up this year too, but there were only a few stalks and we didn't catch them in time to eat.  Bummer.

It was very fun planting the garden, and now watching the plants grow.  If our house sells soon as we hope it will then whoever buys it will have some nice veggies and flowers!

Tulip Time

It's a special time here in West Michigan, it's starting to warm up and the sun is shining more often than not.  It feels great to feel the warm sun and to be able to go outside and enjoy the outdoors.  Last week we went to see all the tulips in Holland since it is Tulip Time there.  We have gone to see the tulips each year for the past four years and each time it is a really special treat.

The tulips were very beautiful and were blooming very nicely.  We stopped at a park to check out the multicolored assortment of tulips they had there.

We also went to the test planting park where there are fields of tulips that can be seen for free.  We didn't go to any of the larger fields like Windmill Island because they charge for entry.

We drove up and down tulip lane, following the signs is always a challenge but seeing all the tulips planted along side the road is always fun.

We posed with statues that probably look a lot like our ancestors from the Netherlands.  See the resemblance?

We could see a windmill from the test planting park, those really are tall fully grown trees all around it, that's how big it is!

We also admired some flowering trees throughout the city.  What a fun time we had.  God's creation is just so beautiful it can't be described with words!

House Update...

Wow, it's hard to believe that it is May already.  Recently we have had more activity on our house and even though it hasn't sold yet we are very hopeful that it will soon.  We had an open house last weekend and it was on a beautiful day.  Two couples came through and one liked our house very much.  They are just starting their search for a house so we can pray that they decide on our house.  Besides that there have been some other people interested and looking.  We don't yet know what all of them are thinking, but that's OK.

We would really appreciate if you would join us in asking God to sell our house soon.  We are still hoping that the house will sell soon so that we can start working in Romania in the summer.