New Dreams and New Plans

Well it has been a long time.  We have not put an update, a bit of news, or even a short hello on here for quite some time.  I hope this fixes our silence.  As some of you know we are still here in central PA living each day and hopefully "blooming where we have been planted."  It can sometimes seem hard to do this when there are days where it feels as though we are flowers in a drought, but through it all God as always proven himself faithful even in our doubts. Praise God our faith is not dependent on our strength.

To give a little back story for those who may not know we moved up here a little over four years ago to continue to follow our dream of raising support to move back overseas as missionaries. Since we are still here this did not obviously happen, and only God knows why, but here we remained and here we tried to bloom.  Lia became connected to the home-school group that meets on Fridays, the boys did what little boys do best, play, get dirty, and beat each other up with lightsabers, and Nate went back to work as an EMT and started to volunteer as the youth group leader in our church the Mountain View Christian and Missionary Alliance. This is how we have tried to bloom, but this also is what brings us to where we are today.

Through ups and downs and turnarounds we have been looking still to the mission that God has called us to, the preaching of his Word to the world around us and the making disciples of the next generation to follow him. In times past this was focused on our love for backpackers, and to this we still hold, travelers are a continually neglected mission field. But the next generation in this country are also being overlooked, and ignored to where now only 4 percent of the millennial generation hold to a biblical world view. This is how we lose the church folks, when our youth walk away from God, and it is never more than one generation away.

So what does this mean, what am I saying? Well in short, we have found a building, and not just any building, an old run down church, a former house of God. It is right here in Jersey Shore and it is ripe for the taking to make it a house of God once more, but this time not as a new church, but as a safe house, a home, a way for those who are seeking God to find him, and hopefully become plugged into a church, or at least a family of believers where they can find the God their heart is seeking for. This building, though, was also once a school, complete with classrooms. To sum up this building is around 18,000 square feet of space! Imagine the possibilities.

So the question still stands, what am I saying? I am saying this, help us. We are looking to buy this building and turn it into a home, for us, but also for the community, someplace where the youth can come and hang out instead of be on the streets with the ever growing heroine problem in our area, or a place where a wandering traveler far from home may be able to find a warm and comfy bed for the night, or even where the seeker can find God waiting for him in the pew of the old sanctuary of the church. But this mission is too big for just us, so we need help. We need God's people to help buy the building, we need God's people to help fund the running of the building, and we need God's people to help fix up the building. We need you to pray, "Lord, how can I help, how do you want me to help, what can I do?"

All we are asking right now is for anyone who feels like God may be placing on their heart a burden for this mission to please let us know through the comments section of this post, or through an email if you know it. For reasons of privacy I am not going to put our email on this post, I hope you understand. Please let us know what you think, and please pray for this ministry. Thank you for reading and may God bless you.