If I may I interupt myself..?

I may?  Great!  Thanks.

Briefly, I am wondering if you will say a prayer for my mother. It has been 2 months now since Dad died, and decisions about her living arrangements are taking their toll on her. We are all working on getting her the best care, but she's under a lot of stress. Please pray that she (Joyce) will feel God's arms enfolding her and giving her peace.  I sent her this little poem:

                     CHOOSE WHERE YOU'LL LOOK

             You cannot dodge all of life's ill-timed blows,
             so choose where you'll look as the raincloud grows:
             look in at yourself...where perception slows,
             where your fears and your doubts would keep doors closed...

             OR...

             turn your eyes to the One from Whom grace flows;
             for, as (s)he who has struggled with pain well knows,
             there's a Holy Hope that sustains all those
             who look UP through their tears and find...rainbows!
                                                                                                     -Becky Rhon

I wish everyone who reads this many rainbows!
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Now I'll un-interupt myself!   I mentioned that I started attending a woman's Bible study. It was during this time that we were asked to fill in for two months for a couple who administered a Christian camp. While there, God answered one of our hearts' desires, against human odds. Please go back to the post I wrote  on Wednesday, June 12th, and remind yourself (or find out, if you haven't read it) what happened. After 32 years, we are still amazed at His gift!

 The ladies in the Bible study were aware that we were trying to find a place for Germán to work. I was told that there was an opening in HCJB's  hospital in Shell (on the edge of the eastern jungle) for the position of maintenance director. That sounded like it would fit my husband perfectly, as he supervises people well, and can fix just about anything!  (My humble opinion!)  Besides his salary, we would get our apartment rent-free, and not have to pay utilities. AND, Dan could go to the little missionary school (Nate Saint Memorial School) if we wished.

Again, I had a dream, in which I was walking up to some big mesh gates that enclosed the HCJB compound, hand-in-hand with a former classmate of mine; later I realized that he was a grandson of one of the mission's founders, and it seemed like he was escorting me into HCJB. Then I dreamt that we were gathered in a second-story room in the hospital building, in a prayer meeting, while in other parts of the floor, one could sense witchcraft trying to find an opening. I had never been inside the hospital, so I was surprised when we arrived there and were put in the guest apartment...on the second floor of the hospital building...in the same format as in my dream!  (And we found out over the years that evil WAS trying to find its way in.) By the way, the big gates in my dream weren't there when we went...BUT while we were there, mesh gates were installed that looked remarkably like the ones in my dream.

We waited to move until Dan had finished the school year, arriving in Shell with me six months pregnant, and Dan almost 6 years old. Shell was a very small town, and the missionary compound was at one end of it. It was from this town that the martyred missionary Nate Saint and his colleagues were operating before they were killed. In fact, the house Nate Saint built was still standing, with an MAF family living there. (Now it is a museum, I believe.) 

The Nate Saint house holds a poignant memory for me. One night after a meeting at the house next to it, I left to walk back to our apartment, and declined the offer of a flashlight. I was so sure I could easily find my way. I kept to the cement walkway and suddenly...I stepped into the air! A second or two later I landed flat on my back on the ground. Thank God that someone passed by about then and helped me up. I hadn't taken into consideration the fact that the walkway split, and one part of it led up onto the veranda of the Nate Saint house...from where I fell.  (Hmmm...that sounds like something you could build an object lesson around, doesn't it?!)

My main worry was for my baby! (She was fine.)  But the next day I went down to see the "scene of the accident" and was shocked.  The veranda wasn't very high, but right under it was a row of pointed stakes! There was one place that had instead a boulder. Then there was one small space, the only one, where there were no stakes or stones, only grass and earth.  And that was precisely where I had fallen! And on my back, not my stomach. I can't imagine what would have happened if I'd hit the stone or, much worse yet, fallen onto the stakes. Isn't God awesome?

I'll see you next time, to share more of God's hand in our lives!

Uh...is that what the Recipe calls for?

I AM going to continue our journey...but first let's think about this:

Who you are in relationship to God is MORE important than where you go or what you do. In fact, where you go and what you do should be the ongoing outcome or consequence of WHO you are in God.  You may be in the place He wants you to be, but if you don't keep growing closer to Him, and if you try doing things (even good things) on your own, He can't use you half as well, and YOU lose out!

Let's suppose I'm making a cake. I find I don't have baking powder. I ask my husband to go buy me some. He comes home with a lovely...pound of prime steak. Now, there's nothing wrong with him bringing me a good steak, IN ITSELF, right?  But that's NOT what I need for the cake. It would taste weird and wouldn't rise!

Things we do ourselves may be very noble, in and of themselves. Good works are great! But is each one necessarily what God is calling for in a particular "recipe"? The closer we are to Him, the better we will be able to follow each "recipe" He asks us to prepare, to make sure the right ingredients are included!

Remember: He puts you in places, jobs, ministries, work, etc. for more than one reason. Yes, He has work to do through you. But He also will use that work to shape you, teach you, help you grow, draw you closer to Himself. This relationship is the most essential ingredient of all His "recipes". (We tend to put the emphasis on the wrong part of the equation!)


                                  Seek Ye First

    Our searching selves look 'round to see the why, the when, the how;
    what else to plan in daily toil, where else to set our plow.
                  We ponder, listen, figure, fret, and hope to steer aright.
                  Uncertainty breeds shaky ground, distracts our hand, our sight...

                                    and we forget...

    that learning Who God is, His Kingdom opening heart-to-heart,
    where spirit, soul and mind embrace, that's where our steps should start.
                   Then He can take all other things and guide them into place.
                   (In fact, He loves to do it while we're looking at His Face!)

    SO...I lift my eyes unto the hills to seek You, Lord of Power.
    My hands reach out to cling to You, unmoving Rock, Strong Tower.
                     You may not always let me know how come, how soon, how far.
                     But You'll always have the grace to show me more of Who You are.
                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                             -Becky Rhon
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Now, where were we? (Go back to the previous post if you need to remember what the "fleece" was.) The answer from the seminary. Well, our application was refused, and it WAS for a really illogical reason! It made no sense to us, anyway. It was a vague, wandering "explanation" that had to do with the fact that we wouldn't have a car! What that has to do with studying, I don't know, but God certainly answered our fleece very specifically!

Around this time, I started attending a women's Bible study in English, and got to know some of the missionaries here. It was there that we heard of another option for our future...which I'll tell you about next time.  See you then!

"Don't Talk to Me in English!"

Actually, he said it in Spanish ("No me hables en inglés!") with a stomp of his three-and-a-half-year-old foot. While in Australia, we had spoken only Spanish to our son, because if we stayed there, he would learn English quickly, in school and with friends. We didn't want him to grow up not knowing Spanish.

But now it was the other way around. Here in Ecuador he was surrounded by Spanish,  and (as we thought then, anyway) he'd go to school in Spanish. When I talked to him in English, he was really upset. (Other people could, but not me!)

Meanwhile, we were trying to adapt to being back in Quito. We had a piece of land here, so we sold half of it, and started building a house.  It was hard for Germán to find a job until the Wycliffe  mission here hired him to keep their vehicles in good shape (he was a trained mechanic) and also work in public relations. But it was only part-time.  So here we were, a little disoriented, with a little boy who wouldn't let me teach him English! (Though we did find a good church.)

At one point Germán said to me, "Let's go back to Australia". Back then, if one returned within three years, there was no need of getting a new visa. You may be thinking, "But didn't God call them back to Ecuador?" Yes, He did. So this idea wasn't very smart, was it? But I figured I'd put out a "fleece".  (Note that I have used "fleeces" on several occasions, but do so with utmost care and not flippantly; the idea is simply to ask for confirmation, like Gideon did in the Bible.)

So I decided I'd write to a number of friends in Australia, none of whom had wanted us to leave.  I figured they'd surely answer right away, saying "Please do come back!" So I asked God to take the situation in hand: if our friends answered, we'd go back. This seemed so much more likely (which was why I chose it - since a "no" from God would be rather dramatic and obvious, going as it would against our logic). If they didn't, we'd know we should stay in Ecuador.

We waited...and waited...and waited. NO ONE wrote back! Finally, after a really long time, one friend wrote and said, "I don't know why you want to come back here"  and told us about prices going way up and other problems in the country. We really shouldn't have even considered going back, but God knew we were struggling and searching, and with His abundant grace went against all probabilities and set us straight. (Sometimes I wonder if our friends even got the letters; maybe they got lost in the mail...on purpose!)

That's not to say everything was great from then on! (Our major problems were still ahead.)  We dealt with "little" problems...like when one Sunday we returned from church and saw our typewriter in the front yard! In the house things were scattered all over the place.  We don't know what the thief was looking for, because he didn't steal anything really valuable.  He grabbed some of my sister's cheap jewelry, but not her pearls. Do you know what else he took? My Australian driver's license! He didn't even take the money we had.  What good an Australian driver's license would do him here in Quito was beyond us!

Another "small" problem was  when Dan disappeared! He loved to stand on our front wall and say hello to everyone who went by. When he was out there, I always kept an eye on him, but somehow he seemed to vanish into thin air. I was SOOO scared. He was such a beautiful little boy, and there have been so many cases of children being kidnapped. I stayed at the house while Germán went out to canvass the neighborhood. I couldn't concentrate on finishing supper; the chicken just lay cold in the pan.  The prospect of anything happening to our precious little one was one of the worst things a parent can imagine.  Finally Germán came back...with Dan in tow!  Some of our teenage neighbors had decided to take him home with them, and hadn't bothered to inform us!
 
 We put Dan into a little school a few blocks away when he was four years old.. He was technically in pre-kinder, but was in with all the kindergarteners. He ended up being quite a ringleader! When the school year finished, the teacher said that since Dan had done so well, if we left him in their school, he could go straight to first grade. If we put him elsewhere, he'd have to wait until he was six. So, since he was ahead, we put him in the Alliance Academy (the American school here where my siblings and I studied) to do kindergarten again, but in English. By the end of the year he was fluent.

So we were back in Quito, finally living in our almost-finished house, with me pregnant (I told you about that in one of the earliest posts - go back and check it out) and we asked ourselves...What next?

One option was to go to a seminary in the States, where one can study in Spanish. So I put out another "fleece", and asked that if we were NOT to go there, our application would be turned down, but for a really stupid reason. It had to be a reason that didn't make sense. I couldn't imagine that happening, but I knew that God doesn't play around with us, and knew He'd use this to let us know what He had in mind.

We got the application back, and....join me next time to find out what the answer was!

From Melbourne (Australia) to Los Angeles in Two-and-a-Half Hours

An older American couple once came to our house for supper. We all spoke in Spanish. (Dan spoke only Spanish until he was five.) As they were preparing to leave, the man asked Dan if he had a piggy bank.  So he ran to get his "Señor Tomate", a big porcelain tomato with a face. When the man gave him a coin to put into the bank, Dan was thrilled. Since he didn't thank the man, I whispered, "What do you say?" He thought for a moment and then said, "Do you have another one?"

Both our first and second churches met in the afternoons, so Sunday mornings we'd go to a park or a flea market, etc. We also found a small Australian church where we felt comfortable (at first), not too far from home. It was less formal than DD's! We made friends there, one with whom I still keep in touch after 35 years.

This church decided to start a small Bible College (we'd call it a Bible School).  It was unaccredited, just for the believers to study Scriptures more deeply, in a more disciplined way.)  I took a course or two (can't even remember in what!). Then they asked me to join the faculty (of 5 or 6! - very small). If it hadn't been unaccredited, there's no way I'd be legally qualified to teach!  But I had grown up with daily family devotions, and obligatory Bible classes in school, so I had had a lot more exposure to the Bible than most of the students. Besides, I enjoy teaching! (One of my close friends there told me that the students considered me to be the best teacher and the one whose classes they enjoyed the most.)

I taught the historical books of the Bible, from Genesis to Ruth, and Acts. In  preparing the lessons I had to keep ahead of my students, so I learned a lot myself! 

I was also asked to teach music. First we studied things like directing music in a church service...I wish I could remember what else, because the material they gave me was very interesting, but I didn't feel right (in this particular case) copying it all off!  Have you heard the cantata "No Greater Love"? (Our choir had sung it in high school; in fact I had a solo part in it, so I was quite familiar with it.) For our second part of the term, I decided that music class would consist of learning and preparing the cantata.  It turned out that we left Australia before the class presented it, but they sent me a cassette - and it sounds like they did a pretty good job.

When we had been in Australia almost five years, Germán felt God calling him to return to Ecuador. So we pulled up our roots there and flew back with our little three-year-old kangaroo. When we were getting ready to leave, Dan told his little friend (also 3) that he would save up his pennies and come back and marry her!

We got some fantastic tickets, thanks to my dad's connections. We payed a little under $1000 total for the three of us, and our luggage could weigh as much as we wanted, as long as the dimensions were correct (and the size allowed was really big). Space was more crucial than weight on this flight.

We left Melbourne at 3:00 p.m. Friday afternoon, had a layover in Aukland, then an hour stop in Tahiti, and  after 20+ hours traveling, arrived in Los Angeles at 5:30 p.m. the same afternoon.  We were going "backwards" through the International Date Line!

After a weekend in Los Angeles shopping and repacking, and almost causing a huge pile-up on a big highway by making a turn as if we were still driving on the left-hand side of the road, we headed back to Quito.

Please join me again next time!
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Start With a Living Room...Add a Couple of Tables

In the last post I explained our growing discontent with our pastor. We really tried to work things out with him. Our desire then was to remain in the church and expand the ministries God was opening. But the pastor made it impossible. So...

We finally had no recourse but to leave. As I think I said before, it was telling that the group of us who left were almost all those that "got things done" in the church. Only a handful of people were left to warm DD's lonely pews.

One of our first tasks was to find a provisional place to meet. Our living room happened to be the biggest, so we congregated at our home. Saddened by DD, we also had a feeling of excitement, looking forward to what God would do as we started a new church, in line with His directions.

A little later, an Australian church offered us the use of their fellowship hall, so that we could hold our services on Sunday afternoons. The church was in a different suburb, a good bit farther away from us, but that was OK...because it was a lot closer to one of the government immigrant hostels. Spanish-speaking immigrants...a prime "mission field"! One of our more important ministries was visiting these people, getting to know them, seeing how we could help them, and inviting them to church. Different ones of us helped in various way. For example, Germán might take men to buy a car, so they wouldn't get ripped off; I might go with a woman to an appointment to interpret for her.

Since we held services in the afternoon, anyone from the hostel missed the supper hour in the dining room, so we women made up for it!  We'd all take food, and after the meeting, we'd spread a big table full of goodies to eat while chatting. In a way, you could say we were setting TWO tables: a spiritual one, and a material one. The latter one had its importance, too, as it was one more way of showing we truly cared about the people who came, and our invitations to church weren't just a way to rack up numbers.

One day when Germán and I had taken our little Dan to a park, we overheard a family talking in Spanish. We introduced ourselves, chatted, and invited them to church. He came to the service the next Sunday and later told his wife that he was amazed at the atmosphere of love in the church...the following Sunday she and their two little girls came with him...and on the fourth Sunday they accepted Jesus into their lives. We forged a personal friendship with them, too, which was a mutual blessing.

Germán and five other men took turns preaching and overseeing other details of the new church. I played the piano, sang, taught Sunday School and interpreted whenever we had an English-speaking guest preacher. Others contributed time and talents. I think this venture was where we most deeply felt God's presence and power; and where we felt spiritually the peace and joy He promised...and where we most sharply felt SECURE...under His wing...

                    Beneath the Shadow
   
           Deep confidence Your shadow brings
           as I curl up beneath Your wings,
                                   my covering safely supervised
                                   by Him Whose power rips through the skies.
           The warmth of Life I lean against
           is both my comfort and defense.
                                   Yes, I may fly, and soar, or glide!
                                    but never too far from Your side.
            Not chain nor leash, not force nor fear,
            but cords of love will keep me near,
                                   so always I return to rest
                                   behind the shielding of Your breast;
            always return to live, to Be
            where best my soul and heart are free,
                                   where of Eternity I dream,
                                   wrapped in Sufficiency's soft gleam,
            in Eagle presence, by Whose sheen
            will my Redeemer's face be seen...
                                   I'll know to Whom it is I cling
                                   beneath the shadow of Your wing!
                                                                                  (Becky Rhon - all rights reserved)
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