Dear Family and Friends,
Greetings and blessings to you all!
What a news to hear in the Netherlands we are going to have a King! I must say I’m a bit sad I won’t be able to be there for the historic occasion as these changes don’t happen very often. To do my own little celebration here, was grateful I recently received a special delivery from the Netherlands including dark chocolate spread, dropjes and stroopwafels! Yes besides family and friends it is the Dutch food I miss the most and these little things make a huge difference!
Here things are going really well, though busy.
I was responsible for coordinating 3 big and 2 small meetings that happened back to back in the past 10 days. These meetings happen once or twice a year. Some of the +/- 100 guests that came are friends and advisers of Loren & Darlene, representatives from other mission organizations and other YWAM leaders. I had never organized them by myself before and I learnt so much in doing so. First of all the preparation time was the busiest one, trying to get all the logistics planned out and all the materials organized. Then trying to get the manpower to actually run the events. I was blessed there was a hospitality team that took care of all the food as those kind of tasks are not possible for me to do while taking care of Hope. So I was mostly making lists, updating itineraries, schedules and so forth. It was a lot of fun though and Hope enjoyed meeting a lot of new people. Now I’m trying to catch up on regular office activities like e-mails as I didn’t do any of that during the meetings.
Jackson has been progressing so rapidly in memorizing the Gospel of Mark. He has already done several presentations of this where he will present a portion of the Gospel. At the end of this month his final assignment is to present the Gospel in a one hour presentation. All of this is verbatim (word by word literally). They don’t add anything and don’t use their own language, but they make it sound like it is their own words as they have mastered the text over the past weeks. As it probably won’t be hard to imagine, Jackson is really good at this as he is such an animated story teller with such a captivating voice. When we go for a walk to the supermarket (half an hour) he will practice on the way there and back. One time he was brushing his shoulders so I thought he had walked under something dirty. He said, that “no, it’s part of the roof that came down when the four friends lowered the paralyzed man in front of Jesus”. All I can say is I hope you will get an opportunity to hear him present this. Personally I took the seminar his school runs and I was amazed at how quickly you learn the memorization technique on a passage of scripture. I still haven’t forgotten what I memorized in the seminar and I have also tried to apply it to a different portion of scripture and it works! It comes down to experiencing the event in front of your eyes and then telling what you saw.
Hope Shekinah is already 17 months old and talking a lot now. She not only is able to communicate in Ngie, Dutch and English, but she also responds to the Korean children on campus in Korean. She loves her friends and knows many of their names now also. She has started praying before meals and will talk a lot of words in baby language and then say “Amen”. She enjoys this so much we often end up praying at least 2-3 times before we eat .
The pregnancy is going well, 25 weeks already! I had a little bit of a scare last week when I had a persistent cramp/pain in my calf muscle for several days. The doctor ended up sending me for an ultrasound to make sure it wasn’t a blood clot and thankfully it wasn’t! Now I don’t feel that pain anymore and am taking some magnesium supplements and bananas to keep the cramping down.
Thank you so much for all your love and support!
Blessings,
Jackson, Anneke, Hope and …
