Your partnership is fulfilling her dream!

We appreciate every one of you and the role you play in this ministry. Your prayers and financial gifts to Avant Ministries are impacting the lives of many people, and today I want to illustrate that with the story of one of my Hebrew students. Heidy is a wife and mother of eight in Bolivia, and she comes from Jewish ancestry. She loves Jesus very much and loves to consider how her faith in Christ connects with her heritage. For many years she has longed to be able to read and understand the Old Testament in its original language. When she discovered the opportunity to join my Hebrew class she was thrilled. She does her homework with remarkable passion and with her eyes always set on the goal.

Heidy interacting in our class via Zoom

Not too long ago she sent me a message and I got her permission to share it with you. Here is my translation from Spanish:

Shalom, brother. Last night I realized that I have now completed a year and two months in Hebrew classes, and I am very grateful to our Beloved Yeshua for you, your patience, and your generosity to allow me to learn and fulfill my personal dream. I will continue to pray for you, your family and your ministry. May you reap in abundance the blessings that JeHoVaH [the caps make reference to God’s name in Hebrew] has for you. Many thanks, brother. May Abba grant me life and health to continue learning with you. I long to be able to read and understand the Torah. That day will be Marvelous for me!

I hope you can sense a little bit of her heart in what she wrote. I want you to know how your partnership in this ministry is touching her and extending to others. She may not say so herself, but she is already starting to understand things in the Hebrew Bible. She is finding Jesus in the Old Testament and showing him to others. Since you are helping make it happen I wanted to pass along her words of gratitude—thankfulness that belongs with you as much as with me!

God loves us, we love others!

 

God’s word teaches us that love is the most important of several important character traits. We can always count on God's love, it never ends! February is a good time to celebrate that and also to express our love for others. We love each of you with Christ’s love, and we have seen you demonstrate your love for us in so many ways, including your prayers for our lives and ministry. A lot has happened for us since we last wrote.

We spent some time in Kansas over the holidays. Scott went early in order to help Joel’s family after Jaden had surgery. Kristi had cataract surgery on both eyes. Both were successful! She chose the single vision lens option, so she’s looking forward to getting glasses in a couple of weeks to correct her astigmatism and farsightedness. We were able to have Lindsey with us for 3 weeks during her Christmas break. Kristi’s mom always makes us feel at home during our time in Kansas. We were able to spend 5 days with our entire family. Our 3 boys and their families came from California, New Hampshire and Arkansas. We loved our grandpa and grandma time with our 5 granddaughters! Needless to say, we didn’t have a dull moment with all 14 of us together! Scott ended up staying a week longer as well. His parents are both in assisted living in Omaha and his mom was going through some health issues. He spent some days helping them out.

It feels like a blur since we’ve been back to Ecuador. Kristi jumped right back into her classroom after missing a couple of weeks of school. She has had more behavior issues to work through in the past weeks. Pray for 1 of the girls in Kristi’s class who has missed the past 11 days of school because of a bone infection. She’s been hospitalized and on IV antibiotics. She’s hoping to be able to go home in the middle of this week. We had 2 girls staying with us for a couple of weeks when we got back home. One of them is the new biology teacher and the other is a friend who was transitioning between apartments. Kristi is helping to plan Spiritual Emphasis Week for the elementary students. Our focus will be “Shine God’s Light Around the World.”

Please pray for us as we are trying to renew our identification cards which are an important part of living in Quito. We started working on this nearly a year ago. We were successful in the first step, transferring our visas to our new passports. Our cards expired in May, but we were unable to get an appointment until November. By then another step of paperwork had changed and become more complicated. We didn’t get that back until the end of January. Unfortunately, there were some mistakes and we need to redo it, but there is no way to make changes through their new online system and no other option. We spoke to the school's lawyer who is also extremely frustrated with the new system. She confirmed that at this point there doesn’t really seem to be a clear solution. Please pray!

Scott stays busy teaching as well! He had a great trip to Guayaquil. He taught on two themes from biblical theology: Discerning Good and Evil, Can One See God and Live? Both pointed very clearly and gloriously to Jesus. There was a good group of people who attended the workshop. They were exceptionally attentive and interacted seriously with the material.

Scott’s digestive issues have improved quite a bit. He is still eating a little carefully–things that are easy to digest, especially rice, potatoes, bread, bananas. What has helped him the most are foods rich in probiotics: homemade sauerkraut and kefir. A lot of good help on YouTube. He has gained back 15 very healthy pounds and would still welcome a little more. Thanks for your prayers!