Monthly Archives: February 2014

We apologize for the mis-spelling (you know which word if you saw it) in the last edition of this post. 🙂

We had an opportunity (Monday the 17^th) to share with four college classes at Geneva College about missions and our ministry to Papua New Guinea. This was fun and exciting, a little nostalgic for Nicole (she was in their seats just 3 years ago), and of course nerve racking. This was a very humbling opportunity, but we took it anyways with the hope and intention to challenge young people into full-time missions and raise the awareness of unreached people groups around the world.

We shared in a Matthew class, a Greek class, a Globalism class as well as an English class. We tried to connect each class to their respective subjects. Trying to tie the purpose and privilege of studying the book of Matthew to missions was pretty easy seeing that the conclusion of the book is the Great Commission 🙂 . The English class was a last minute add-in; we tied in the value of literacy and how we have so many tools here in America that we take for granted. We taught the students that typically all unreached people groups are illiterate; meaning they cannot read or write their own language. We take so much for granted here in America, we pray we use our abundant blessings to fulfill God’s task to reach this world with His glory. One of those ways is to use our resources (technology, information, finances, medicine, personnel, etc.) not for ourselves and be a dam of blessings, but to be conduit of blessings and flow to the whole world.

We had a great time at Geneva; we met up with several friends and made other new friendships. God is so good to us, He even provides friends along our journey to encourage us. Only our God could ever be so thoughtful!

PRAY we were able to challenge (even just one person) someone into full-time missions, and that the others were challenged to be a part of full-time missions in some way for a lifetime. Thank you for your constant support and partnership.

Sincerely, Seth & Nicole Stokes, your feet to the unreached. Romans 15:20

We have had many things happen this past month and a half; from fear and concern to joy and excitement. As many of you know (as seen in our latest newsletter) our support is now over 22%! That is very exciting for us as well as for many of you who are already supporting us through prayer and finances.

The past two weeks has also brought some of our tears, to smiles. Our niece Eden (age 5, Seth’s brother’s family; who is in Indonesia) began to get really sick after she and her family went into the Dem tribe to survey where they will build their tribal house. When they got out she had a fever of over 100 degrees for longer than a week. Many doctors could not pinpoint “what was going on” but she was given malaria eradication medicine and began to slowly improve. Also, during that time, Seth’s sister Jennie was due with their third child and the baby was late. This gives us all a scare because she has high-risk pregnancies. We had many crazy ideas floating in our heads like; “is the baby going to live?!… is Eden going to be okay?!… etc”. But thanks to our God who IS rich in mercy and grace blessed both children; Eden is now healthy and Jennie had her baby at a whopping 9 lbs 7 oz, his name is Lazarus and we are glad he came forth 🙂 . We just came back from Tennessee to see our new nephew. It was great to be able to see him!

Our Niece Eden

Recently we had a great opportunity to teach a public 5^th grade class about missions! The class was going through Spanish missionaries in their social studies book and our friend who teaches that class thought it would be an awesome opportunity to bring two missionaries into the class for a day and talk about what it is like to be a missionary. We shared about our training, what we can expect life to be like overseas, languages as a whole, the purpose of being a missionary (being able to share this in a public school was a privilege), showed two videos, and had many questions asked. We hope we were able to speak truth in a clear way to these young children, some of who may never enter through church doors. PRAY for the kids and for the Spirit to work in their lives, that they might have questions for the teacher and any other spiritual influence in their lives.

Continue to PRAY for us, as we will soon begin to travel quite a bit, also that we would steadily raise our support so we can get to the field. We have another opportunity to speak at 3 classes at a local college, please pray we can communicate clearly and challenge these young people into full-time missions! We hope the rest of this update encourages you. Many of you have prayed for “laborers into his harvest”, recently several of our friends made it to PNG to serve full-time in tribal church planting (Hambrices, Bullingtons, Crabtrees, Sanders, and others). Also, several other friends of ours are heading to the field some time this year (Williams, Haynes, Keefes, and others as well). In regards to pilots, one of our closest friends (the Leedahls) head to PNG in the next month, Lord willing they will be our pilots. God has completely blessed them, they started raising support around December two months ago and are pretty much ready to go to PNG! We hope these updates encouraged you, the Lord said He will build His church, and He has been a faithful God.

Speaking at the Public School

Our Nephew Lazarus

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