MMS Visit 3.12.15

Hey all! We’re in Coshocton, OH -- home of MMS Aviation! You know how close we are to being fully funded and starting at MMS. It is such an encouragement to be here and reconnect with how God has called us to serve. Even in the short time we have been here, God has affirmed his plans for us! We are grateful to rest in his faithfulness and provision!

We had a great trip out to Ohio. It takes about 6 hours from Harrisburg so the kids were prepared with lots of car activities and snacks!

The first stop was the hangar -- OF COURSE! We got the see lots of familiar faces and some new ones, too. A few MMSers, who we hadn’t met yet, knew us from our facebook posts and approached us with an inquisitive, “Gudemans? Great to see you! Can’t wait till you get here!” We had the distinct pleasure of seeing a modified Cessna 182 belonging to SIM USA take its first test flight since modifications. This was the same airplane with the diesel engine that we mentioned in our summer newsletter (2014). It was so great to see that project come full circle.

We are staying at the Stalter House, MMS’s guest house. Upon arrival, we were settling into the bedrooms and unpacking our cooler. Andy called me to come upstairs. He said I just had to see what was in the bedroom closet. I was unsure…was it gross or funny or weird??? So, for the past two years I have been blaming Andy for losing a favorite skirt of mine. He does the laundry at our house and I was sure the skirt had gone the way of single socks. Turns out, I brought that skirt with us to MMS for our initial interview…and left it hanging in the closet which is where we found it yesterday!

Dan and Juli Pottner (Dir. of Human Resources for MMS) welcomed us for dinner and we are quickly feeling like part of the MMS family!

On this trip we are scouting out housing options and schools as well as visiting with MMS families. We only have 30% of our funding left to go so it’s time to start making concrete plans for moving.

Look for updates over the next few days while we are at MMS!

-Trisha

On Abundance & an Update

This month is going to be tight. In the fall our 4-person family celebrates 3 birthdays, Halloween (celebrate is a strong word – more like participate with minimal expense), Thanksgiving, and Christmas. All this between October 27 and December 25. It’s a budgeting challenge (read: nightmare). We spend pretty conservatively, but up to this point, no amount of planning prepares us for financial-peace-of-mind in the month of January. Ever.

One of my strategies this month is to grocery shop in my own pantry and freezer. I do this a few times a year simply to avoid waste but in January it is a necessity. Now, we eat a lot of fresh food so the pantry is slim pickings – few canned veggies, fruits, or soups. You might already know that we are gluten-free and virtually grain-free so pastas and breads are absent from the cupboards. I just say this so you can imagine the scene. I was originally squirming at the idea of fewer fresh fruits and veggies but as I inventoried (yes, inventoried – complete with notepad in hand and headlamp on head) the freezer and pantry, I realized that things are not bleak. In fact, despite my financial/culinary distress there is, in fact, an ABUNDANCE.

-->Freezer contents: 12 lb. turkey, 1lb pack of cubed pork, 1.5 lb pork belly, chicken apple sausages (which we ate last night, so cross them off the list), frozen blueberries, a bag of shredded cheese, frozen cranberries, lots of broth, marinara sauce, butter, and frozen bananas.
-->A grocery shop last week added a Costco pack of chicken thighs and 6lbs of ground beef, lunch meat, cheese, and milk.
-->Pantry contents: almond flour, coconut flour, tapioca and arrowroot flours, raisins, sunflower seeds, rice rollers, applesauce (unopened), sardines, coconut milk, 3 buttnernut squashes, onions, and more boring stuff.
-->Plus, there is food in the fridge…like cabbage and condiments and eggs :-)

Most of this stuff has accumulated over the last 6-9 months. Suffice to say, I don’t think we’ll starve. You know what? I don’t even think we’ll WANT for anything.

 

Sometimes I have the tendency to look at things and see what is missing. Obviously, we are missing bacon in our freezer right now. Sad, I know. 

But the truth is…well, having bacon would be nice. Maybe that’s a bad example. See, a metaphor can only take you so far.

Back to the point. I see what’s missing rather than celebrating the abundance that God has provided.  We ate those chicken apple sausages over roasted acorn squash and onions last night. IT WAS AWESOME. It wasn’t settling for seconds. It wasn’t meh. Neither were the mini-pizzas we made with the frozen marinara sauce and shredded cheese from the freezer on homemade crusts.

In the midst of our need – our January—God continues to supply. In support raising, Andy and I have been resting at 60% funding for a while (two months or so). We tend to focus on the 40% that’s missing rather than what we have and what God provided us with over the last two months.

We’ve had extra time with family because no one wants to meet in December to talk about giving money. We’ve had time to begin the purging process in preparation for moving and downsizing. We’ve spent time with our friends – the first people to be neglected when our schedule gets hectic. We’ve built fires in our fireplace because we are home to enjoy them. I cleaned with cleaning products rather than wet paper towels.

The point is – OUR FREEZER AND OUR PANTRY ARE FULL! This month’s budget might be slim but God’s provision doesn’t stop. His provision began before our time of need arose. Those things have been in the freezer for a few months and tonight I’ll roast a turkey that’ll feed us for days! 

There are lots of areas in my life where I see what’s missing rather that what has been provided. Today, though, we will celebrate 60% rather than moan about the missing 40%.

If, however, you’d like to be part of that missing 40%, well – we would welcome you happily as we celebrate! 

-Trisha

Merry Messy Christmas!

 

 

This post began several weeks ago as our Christmas letter and after about 7 drafts, I gave up. This year was just too full, too hard, too good, too raw…too much to capture and make palatable for a Christmas letter. So, after a few drafts I was out of words and, thankfully, Andy said, “This isn’t a Christmas letter, this is a blog post.” YES. 

Merry Christmas – here’s what began as your Christmas letter and ended as a blog post that might make you think we’re crazy! I’m pretty sure Christmas letters are supposed to recap the year and share reflections…which we sort of do all the time now with facebook and instagram and blogs and all the other social media venues that I haven’t ventured into. I don’t tweet. We tried to think of how we would sum up this year in a glossy, meaningful way and – to be honest – we came up short. Honestly, my first draft of the aforementioned Christmas letter was full of clichés. I was the queen of clichés. We were like a Norman Rockwell painting incarnate in the first draft.

Generally, we feel like we have no idea what’s going on and we are hanging on for dear life to get through the week in one piece. In a good way, of course. The fullness of life can sometimes feel like more that we can handle. Our house is a mess, the sink is full of dishes, there’s three weeks of laundry folded on top of the dryer, and sometimes our kids eat cheese and apples and olives for dinner. 

That’s just the outward reflection of the inner chaos, though, isn’t it? It is for us. We often, even though we love God, feel like we are wandering. Not wandering without Christ, but wandering…more like faithful plodding. We go. We move forward {at least we think it’s forward}. We walk where the Lord leads us. 

Visual aid: Imagine a team building activity where you’re blindfolded and told to complete an obstacle course with a partner who is also blindfolded. There you go. That’s our life. Maybe it’s yours, too…

There is a strange comfort in knowing that we serve a God who can take our jumbled up, messy lives and make beauty. We aren’t going into missions because we have it all together. We are going because we are called and somehow God makes sense of our chaos because it glorifies Him. We are far from perfect. We hide, we are dirty, we fall. Yet our God comes to rescue us. We have focus in our journey to missions because God gives it to us. We make amazing progress in our support raising because God leads and guides our steps. We are busier than ever sharing and moving towards serving with MMS…but we are still, every day, in desperate need of Christ our Savior. Christ came as a baby, helpless and needy, and ultimately righted all our wrongs. And he comes day after day after day to show us that we need him. To love us in our mess. I guess the recap or reflection for this year is that we are clueless. But we are led. Led by our Savior.

During Christmas our kids are fascinated with the baby Jesus. They love pretending to hold the baby and they want to talk about what it was like for Mary to take care of her baby. The nativity is, by far, their favorite decoration. We sing about the baby Jesus in many Christmas hymns. In many of those hymns, however, the words about baby Jesus are not about his baby-ness. The familiar words of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Holy Night, and Come Thou Long Expected Jesus recount the position of sinners and power of our reconciling Savior. 

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus…
Born to set thy people free; 

from our fears and sins release us…
Born a child and yet a King…

Hark the herald angels sing…
God and sinners reconciled…
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die…

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
Long lay the world in sin and e’er pining
Til he appeared and the soul felt its worth

The words are about how this baby, born meek and mild, will reconcile sinners with God. Unable to reconnect with God on their own and after hundreds of years of silence from God and the prophets, the Israelites – and sinners all around – will have a Savior. As this thought settles on my heart, I am reminded that God will stop at nothing to pursue us…including entering our messy, chaotic world as a baby. A baby is virtually irresistible to everyone. Who doesn’t love a baby? Other than King Herod. Many times babies have the power to bring families together, pulling the wandering lost sheep back into the fold as everyone marvels at this new miracle, this new chance at life. And didn’t baby Jesus do just that? He began the long process of drawing the family of God back together.  

I felt slightly less insane when our pastor preached on Sunday along a similar theme…it’s not about the fragility of the Christ child. It is about what the baby Christ reveals to humanity. Christ came not to overwhelm us with his cuteness, but to overwhelm us with his power and glory. Sometimes I feel like I have the ability to take something simple/clear/concise and make it complicated. That’s how I felt about the non-baby-ness of Christ topic. Geez, why do I have to take the cheerful cuteness right out of Christmas?!?!? But Christmas was never meant to be cheerful or cute. So, I won’t apologize.

But I will invite you to live in the mess. Sometimes I let the piles of laundry make me grumpy. Like yesterday.  Always be seeking to see Christ more clearly but don’t let the mess of your life block your vision of Christ. Like I did yesterday.

Well, the house isn’t any cleaner. All the wrong things are still in all the wrong places. But we are rescued. We are covered. We might feel lost and messy but we aren’t. Well, we are but our Savior has already made it right. He puts all the right things in all the right places. Rest easy, dear ones. Your house, your life, your piles, your clutter…you will never get it right. But that’s ok. Our life is a stinking mess, kinda like the manger, but God is still using us and glorifying himself along the way. 

Merry Christmas!

 

p.s. Please visit us on facebook at En Route – People, Planes & Prayer to see all the photos, updates, and ongoing recaps of our life and missionary journey! There’s pictures of the kids, pictures of us in turkey hats, and a plethora of great kids quotes! You can also follow Trisha on instagram for similar types of things, plus foodie posts :) 

Giving Tuesday : Gudemans En Route

Hey! Did you know that yesterday was Giving Tuesday??? We didn’t!!! How could we have missed this since we are in the midst of a major support raising effort to be at 85% by the end of the year?!?!?!

We’ll chalk it up to being newbies :-)

Despite the fact that it’s now Wednesday…let’s keep the Giving Tuesday momentum going! We’ll call it Partnership Day {we don’t want any day of the week to feel left out}.

We are close to 60% of our monthly needs met through pledges and donations. The Lord is really speaking to our hearts about meeting our financial goals quickly so we can GET to MMS!!! God is saying unmistakably now, it’s time. We are ready to serve and our hearts are already there.

Because time is of the essence and it takes MMS a little while to process gifts, please call or email us with your decision to be a partner in ministry (If you’ve set up a recurring donation online but haven’t heard a thank-you directly from us, it’s because we haven’t received our update from MMS).

Donate online (click on the big DONATE button on the right sidebar) or by speaking with us. We can give you step-by-step directions for how to give online or by sending your donation through the mail.

We believe that God is glorified in the joining of hands and hearts and resources for His Kingdom. When the people of God come together to support Kingdom work, He is glorified!

In Him,

Andy and Trisha

Missionary Math

We've been learning a lot this week about taking ourselves out of the equation.

When we talk to people about partnering with us financially, we talk a great deal about ourselves. Mostly because we think that's what they want to hear. And because they ask us questions about us. We spend valuable talking time focused on US and the work that WE will do and how God will use US in his service.

We.
Us.
Me.
My.
I.

We have to
    must.
    need.
    to stop talking so much about ourselves and talk more about God. God is doing this amazing work in the world and he wants his people (read: you and me) to join in the work.

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who labor build it in vain.
psalm 127:1

We can talktalktalk about how the Lord has called us into missions and tellyoutellyoutellyou all about what we will do. But we will quickly run out of things to say and we will sound like a broken record. Sound like a broken record. Sound like a broken record.

But when we talk about the Lord, we never run out of things to say. Let it be Him who builds our house. Let it be Him who shines brightest. Let it be Him who we continually glorify. 

I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord, forever; 
with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.
psalm 89:1

Birthday cards and internationally mailed homecooked meals

We got our first card from someone we don't know.

It's kind of a weird thing about being a missionary. Lots of people know you, pray for you, see your picture, and share your stories but you have never met them. We don't know the names of all the people who lift us up in prayer or who think of us on our birthday or who give an update about us to their missions committee.

We trust that they are there, though, because without them we wouldn't be missionaries.

Grace's brithday is coming up later this month and she got a card from Bob & Pat Smith (their names were not changed because their names are Bob & Pat Smith). A 7 year old's birthday is kind of a big deal.

Just in case you forgot.

So, even if you get a card from people you've never met, it's awesome.

There was much excitement when Grace opened the birthday card from from the aforementioned not-high-risk-of-identity-disclosure-so-I-didn't-change-their-names Bob & Pat and their congregation, which we'll be visiting in December. It was really special to sit at the kitchen table and listen to her read in halted 6.99 year old reading all about the weather, Bob & Pat's grandchildren in between peppered questions about being a missionary kid and hopes for a happy year. They described how our picture is on their Missionary Letter bulletin board.

What a gift for our children to be folded into the families of those who love and care for us as missionaries.

Supporting a missionary is more than the money. The money is necessary, let's be frank. The biggest thing I've read, however, in my internet trolling of missionary blogs is that missionaries are lonely. Sometimes they are literally lonely because they serve in an isolated location. Often, it seems, that missionaries are lonely because they're L.O.N.E.L.Y. Alone in a crowd. What makes you feel better when you feel alone in a crowd (because we've all felt that, missionary or not)? What makes you feel remembered?

A birthday card from a congregation that's never met you but is praying for you and celebrating with you?

How do you take care of your missionaries? This has really shaken up how we try to care for missionaries we support both locally and far flung. Cards, emails, home-cooked meals (not ideal for international mailing), and care packages (better for international mailing) are part of our routine now. And now that we've been on the receiving end, I realize that our commitment to missions is more than the monthly donation.

Grace's card -- embellished with some of her handiwork ;-)

On receiving gifts

What is the proper way to receive a gift? We'd better figure this out because we will all be faced with this situation at some time or another.

I've brainstormed some appropriate gift-receiving responses:
HUGE smile
Clapping (if you're under age 6)
Exclaiming something along the lines of -- "Oh my gosh! How did you know?" or "Wow, I am SO surprised."
Hugging the giver
Saying "Oh, you shouldn't have" or "You didn't have to do this."
Make a big deal out of it and say how you can't believe you forgot their gift, ohmygoshthisissoembarrassing.
Sweat.

Or
just

receive
it
with
a
grateful
heart.

We tend to downplay ourselves by intimating that we are not worthy of the gift. Is that for us to decide? Or the giver?

We have had several weeks of being on the receiving end of gift-giving as more people have partnered with us in missions. I think we've gained 13% in just 6 weeks! While we were driving home Andy brought up the topic of how we respond to God's gifts. We praise Him for his provision, express amazement at His goodness, we thank Him for using believers to advance the gospel. While those are appropriate responses, they are kind of grown-up versions of the list I brainstormed above.

Thank you thank you thank you! Oh, Lord, you shouldn't have.
Thank you God, but you didn't have to do this.
How did you know, O Lord, that I needed this? Thank you so much!
Oh, thank you God, but I don't deserve this, did you save the receipt?

Recently, we were blindsided by one individual's generous gift. It is a major purchase and we had already been planning how we were going to squirrel money away. Over the next several days, Andy became increasingly self-deprecating, wondering why he had received this gift...we hadn't even done a polished presentation...we fumble over our words when we talk with folks about financial partnership...how could this have happened?

As if it was a curse rather than a blessing.

While Andy was mulling over the situation he happened to get together with his friend Jeremy. He shared the story and his subsequent thoughts/emotions and Jeremy, in true Christian love, knocked some sense into Andy. It was sort of backwards route to getting Andy to not only see the gift for what it was -- A GIFT -- but also recognize his sinful pattern of thinking.

"Don't you think you are good enough for someone to buy something for you?"
Poke.
"Do you think you need to be worthy of this gift?"
Poke.
"Aren't you good enough?"
Poke. 

Well, no.
Will we ever be good enough? No.

But we are missing something. The thing that helps us transition from knowing we are unworthy to accepting a gift despite our condition.

Expectancy.
Anticipation.
Confidence.
Hope.

Ok, four things that mean the same thing.

In the Jesus Storybook Bible, the story of Jesus embracing the little children is adapted. As the disciples bicker about who will enjoy the gift of sitting at Jesus' right hand, Jesus slips away and joins the play group of children running around nearby.
"So while Jesus' friends were arguing, some people who knew all about getting gifts -- in fact, you might say they were gift-experts -- had come to see Jesus. Who were they? They were little children" (pg. 258).

Now. My kids are not always ideal specimens at receiving gift but just roll with the analogy. Anytime you over-think an analogy, it breaks down. This analogy is used in the Bible. though, so I think it should hold up fairly well.

Children don't have the the guilt and angst and over-analyzing-tendencies and mis-placed humility and BAGGAGE that we do.
They simply receive. They don't presume to deserve the gift that is offered. They don't plan to behave in a certain manner when a gift is given to them.

But they are so grateful. So smiley and huggy and full of electric happiness down to their toes. They also, with an innocence only available to newer humans, expect to receive gifts from people who love them. They are disappointed when there is no gift from a favorite aunt or from grandma.

People who love each other give each other gifts.

God loves us.

God gives us gifts.

We need to develop our sense of anticipation along with our response gratitude. Should we be surprised when God provides? No. Should we be smiley and huggy and full of electric happiness down to our toes? Yes.

by Trisha