the snapshot:
News:
The July 4th block party was a hit! Thanks for your prayers.
God is slowly but surely answering our prayers for connection with our neighbors.
We have reached 74% of our monthly funding goal.
We want to hear an update from you and ways we can be praying for you!
Prayer Requests:
Please pray that we will be faithful with the connections God has given us in our neighborhood. Pray for relationships to grow and bear fruit.
Please pray for the Lord to provide more financial support partners. We still need to raise $1,975 more/month.
Please pray for humility and wisdom as we figure out a good rhythm of managing projects for the ministry amongst the 3 buckets of compassion, mission, and HTBM.
the story:
Thanks to you all showing up with your prayers, bags of ice and chips, and willingness to make friends with strangers, the July 4th block party was a success! In attendance were around 20 neighbors, 20 church friends, and a dog.
While we are excited to share more about the conversations we got to have and the way God provided the perfect blend of people to both host and attend, we want to pull back and share some of the backstory of what God has been doing in our little slice of Anaheim, CA. Sometimes, we get so caught up in sharing the grand and glorious moments that we are not faithful to share the little, day-to-day steps along the journey, the ways God has shown us His consistent faithfulness and attentiveness to our prayers, however small.
So, here it goes…
It all started with a prayer and a cat.
David and I moved to Orange County back in September about two weeks after our wedding in Oklahoma City, OK and five months after we returned from life as missionaries in Thailand.
On coming back to the USA, we knew God was leading us to exemplify the same sort of lifestyle we lived in Thailand, sans the cold showers and mosquito spray applications multiple times a day. Intentionally living out our faith and inviting others to do the same was God’s call for us here as much as it was on the other side of the world.
But it’s easy to slip out of that, right? When we moved into David’s childhood home with his parents, saying hi to the neighbors of 25 years wasn’t natural or comfortable. As time went on, the burden to do more than pull in and out of the driveway with little more than a wave (if that) to those who shared our stomping grounds grew… uncomfortable. We were telling others in our Christian circles to “be missionary-ish” right where God had them: their homes, workplaces, families, wherever. Were we doing that ourselves?
So we prayed for God to show us what to do. Please open up a door, give us an opportunity to connect with someone. Having dabbled in Rosaria Butterfield’s The Gospel Comes with a Housekey, a book about how neighborly hospitality draws people to Jesus, Reagan would occasionally take walks around the neighborhood, just to get the lay of the land, maybe say hi to someone, maybe make a friend, maybe talk about Jesus. What else could we do? Maybe we would start gardening out in the front yard? Just be available? Lord, would you please show us?
One day, a man showed up at our door. His name was Pedro, he told us, and his little gray kitten was in our backyard, getting bullied by a larger cat. Could we help him rescue his kitten?
We let him into the backyard and looked around, to no avail. The kitten seemed to be gone, but what we did find was the time and space to actually talk to another human whose backyard adjoined ours.
Pedro was a big, friendly, 40-something guy from Mexico. He had a wife and three kids, he informed us, and we were welcome to come over anytime and take home a bag of the guavas that grew in his backyard.
We exchanged numbers with our new neighbor-friend and thanked Jesus when we walked back inside. Certainly, on the scale of life changing events, this interaction would appear to anyone else as just a teensy speck. But in the spiritual realm, something was forming, solidifying: our confidence in the One who is always at work and who hears our prayers for help, and whom we knew would orchestrate something bigger and beyond what we could see at present.
(By the way, the kitten made it back home. Pedro calls us every few weeks about it getting out again. It's always fine.)
How About You?
We try to take some time each day to pray for our ministry partners, and we like knowing we are praying for specific, current things in their lives. We would love to hear an update on your life and how we can pray for you. Talk to us!
Money in the Bank
We are thankful that God is bringing more people to partner with us. We are currently receiving 74% of our financial goal each month. Our next goal is to reach 100% of our monthly giving by August 31st, 2019. This means we need an additional $1,975/month.
Like we have said before, we would love to have as many possible be a part of what we are doing, whether they can give 1 penny or $100.
If you would like to learn more about partnering with us, you can ask us or click the button below!
How to Be Missionary-ish
Is there something God has put on your heart to do... but you're at a loss as to what that looks like? Is there something you've been praying about for awhile that seems like it's not being answered?
Discouragement in these kinds of ways trips us up all the time. It's tough to move forward in faith when you're stuck in the tension of the ambiguity. If you're up to share it with us, we would love to hear from you so we can encourage and pray with you.