Update

Dear Family & Friends,

Just wanted to let you know that lately no news has been good news! Things here in Indonesia have been fairly normal... Ha! Even as I just finished that last sentence of ‘normal’ I look down and see an ant coming out of my computer and I laugh and think “ha!, normal is a hard thing to come by when living in Indonesia!”. One awesome thing that happened this week was Chloe got a hair cut! Why is this so great you ask? Chloe has been growing her hair out for a year now for ‘Locks of Love’ and just this week her hair was finally the 10” inch length needed and so we cut it off and mailed it off! She was so  excited. :)

A prayer request and ministry update this week is my Indonesian Tuesday night Bible study. As a group, we have been working through an NTM study guide from creation to Christ and the last few weeks we’ve been working through the beginning of the story: Creation (6 days), Adam & Eve, Sin, Cain & Able, Noah’s Ark, and then the tower of Babel this last week. It’s been an awesome experience for me to just see and listen to their questions. One really hard issue that we have been working through is the age old debate of “creation vs. evolution”. The problem that we have been facing with our Indonesian friends is that in school they were taught that the Bible is true and evolution is true (sound familiar?). The other hard thing for them is to think about a smart Dr. who has studied evolution and so he just can’t be wrong. Right? Wrong. In Indonesia people are also taught from a young age to except one another and value each other. This might sound great, but it also moves into the realm of “we are all worshiping the same God but in different ways...” With working through this mind set we’ve been going through the Creation story and we’ve been asking lots of questions of them and answering questions from them. It’s safe to say I LOVE THIS about living here. It’s why we’re here right?! To help people and their world view the best we can, whenever we can. There sure is such a great need here for grounded Christians who have studied the Bible and are walking with our God!

As for a visa update, thank you for your prayers. The language school that Ruth and the girls have their visas through is a Christian school and they are working with us and our org. to allow us to keep the paid visa’s through them but allow us to move early to our region of ministry. What’s happening now is they are finishing a 3 to 4 month language study abroad program. We are pumped about this! What we’ll be doing is picking two culture topics like weddings & funerals and study them in depth here in Central Java. Then restudy those same topics in our new region looking for differences and writing up a paper on our findings. This study abroad program should allow us to move to Manado in early October after the holy month of Ramadan for the Muslims is finished. A BIG thank you for everyone who financially helped us out this last month. Your gifts are greatly appreciated and really helped with our visa bill.

Working together to reach Indonesia,

~Ben, Ruth, Chloe, Gwen, Addie & Baby in belly.