Monthly Archives: March 2017

We are getting ready to start trip 1 of 2… This coming Monday we will rent a box truck, pack it up, and then drive it to Philadelphia (our friends warehouse-where the container will be loaded) on Tuesday to unload. Some of our larger items like our solar system have already been shipped to the warehouse. This is a busy yet exciting time; we are making people aware of this because of our donation list and registries. IF you were interested in participating in this, could you bring those larger items to our home church by this Sunday, April 2, that would help us out tremendously! We would like to take a regular truck on the second and final trip when we go in three weeks with all of the other miscellaneous items we will receive.

We want to say thank you to you all! So many of you have already purchased things from our registries and we are amazed and humbled by your love that you have lavished on us. Thank you!

We have the bulk of our insurances in process, taxes finalized (whew!), paperwork being chipped away, visa process underway, knocking out one computer job after another, solar system taken care of, our house is drawn-up and being looked at by a professional, and the container will be shipped out on April 21^st… needless to say things are a goin’… We still speak regularly. Nicole did an amazing job at our home church’ ladies conference, and we still have several other speaking engagements. Nicole speaks at a ladies tea next weekend and we share at three more churches plus a handful of other times at our home church in various Sunday school classes. We are also squeezing in some family time. Life is like standing on a balance beam; while juggling at night, in a rain storm, but God is gracious and supplying enough strength for each day. But to be honest, we are feeling rather worn out and stressed. Thank you for your prayers! Please continue to pray for us to be able to get some rest and recovery before going back.

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes.

Hi there! It is crazy to think that we head back to Vanuatu in about a month… Everyday has been filled with communicating to churches, paperwork, insurances, taxes (it’s that season), while also trying to balance seeing friends and family. Seth speaks every Sunday in Sunday school classes at our home church. Nicole has two opportunities to speak in the upcoming month, one is tomorrow (Saturday) at a ladies conference our home church is hosting, and another is in two weeks at another supporting church. Needless to say, the days are flying by and weeks seem like a moment, but God is giving us grace to make it through this season, we covet your prayers.

We recently communicated about various registries through three avenues plus a donation list. This does not include our needs-list that several churches are praying about and seeing what God would have them do (our vehicle, container and a few miscellaneous items). We have been blown away that less than a handful of individuals took care of most of our Amazon list and about half of our Walmart list! To see what is still remaining click on the links below:

Our Amazon list: It is labeled “Stokes wish list for house”.

Click Here: Amazon Registry

Our Bed Bath and Beyond list: it is under Seth Stokes-“Housewarming”

Click Here: Bed Bath and Beyond Registry

Our Walmart list: is under “wedding registry”, it was either that or a baby registry… and we did not want to confuse people

Click Here: Walmart Registry

The registry items are for our personal use, please send it to our home address and have it delivered by April 15^th.

3750 Rural Court East

Pittsburgh PA, 15221

 

We also made a donation list for our mission with Reach Vanuatu, we have communicated with our co-workers a good-bit and this is what we came up with: Donate List-Reach Vanuatu

 

The donation list can be sent to our home church by April 15^th as well, if you live near the Philadelphia area, please contact us directly and we can give you an address near you (the container ships out of Philadelphia). If you would like to send a gift to one of our teammates, please communicate to us about how you can do that.

 

Harvest Baptist Church

224 Harvest Ln.

Natrona Heights PA, 15605

 

Thank you so much for your faithfulness to us and to our ministry. Please continue to pray for us as we finalize things and get ready to get back into full-time ministry. Like we shared previously, we just want to take full advantage of this one time opportunity of sending a container and fill it to the max, it is an up-front cost but quality and prices are far better here in the USA for these items. Thank you for your prayer support, we feel that everyday, we appreciate you ministering to us in that way.

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes.

*For clarification… All registry items send to: Seth & Nicole Stokes, 3750 Rural Court East, Pittsburgh, PA 15221

Our Amazon list: It is labeled “Stokes wish list for house”.

Click Here: Amazon Registry

Our Bed Bath and Beyond list: it is under Seth Stokes-“Housewarming”

Click Here: Bed Bath and Beyond Registry

Our Walmart list: is under “wedding registry”, it was either that or a baby registry… and we did not want to confuse people 🙂

Click Here: Walmart Registry

 

Your feet to the unreached,

Seth and Nicole Stokes

As you all know, we leave next month to head back to Vanuatu, this is an exciting time for us, but this means several things have to happen as well. Many of you know we are shipping a container and that means we want to take full-advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity with this container. Our solar system takes up a good bit of space, but we still have empty space so we want to fill it! Many of you have asked about “what we need”, and what you “can get us”, so we put together several lists:

All registry items send to: Seth & Nicole Stokes, 3750 Rural Court East, Pittsburgh, PA 15221

Our Amazon list: It is labeled “Stokes wish list for house”.

Click Here: Amazon Registry

 

Our Bed Bath and Beyond list: it is under Seth Stokes-“Housewarming”

Click Here: Bed Bath and Beyond Registry

 

Our Walmart list: is under “wedding registry”, it was either that or a baby registry… and we did not want to confuse people 🙂

Click Here: Walmart Registry

 

Our Donate list: we wrote back and forth with our pastoral staff and co-workers and thought through some things that our team and our ministry could use, so we put together a list to donate towards. These things do not have to be new, but in decent shape. Everything can be delivered/sent to our home church, but if you live near the Philadelphia area, please write us and we can give you another address to send things. (Click on Link Below)

Donate to Reach Vanuatu

All items new or used (just not damaged and in good shape)

Please deliver/ship items to 1 of 2 addresses C/O Seth Stokes:

Harvest Baptist Church                                                   Valley Forge Baptist Temple

224 Harvest Lane                                                              616 South Trappe Rd.

Natrona Heights, PA 15065                                             Collegeville, PA 19426

 

Click Here to Open Donate List Separately: Donate List-Reach Vanuatu

 

We want to say “thank-you” to everyone, we don’t expect everyone to participate in this, nor do we expect to receive everything on this list, but like we said, we want to take advantage of the container. We love and appreciate you all, thank you for your prayer and partnership in our ministry.

Your feet to the unreached,

Seth and Nicole Stokes

Just finished the last class. They did well overall. Not the easiest bunch to teach, but I think they enjoyed it and learned something new. The whole concept of no McDonald’s, wifi, video games, or other modern conveniences we have in America was a huge shock to them. One kid literally said “I got to have my two-ply (soft) toilet paper”, when we told them the people in jungles don’t usually have toilet paper unless they happen to go to town and buy it-(they would just use leaves). The toilet paper overseas is much more thin than we have here in America. It’s the little things 🙂 The kids had no clue what missionaries are or what they do. All of the teachers were super appreciative of what we said and what we do for a living. Thank you guys for praying for us! We hope that this helped to impact these kids (and teachers) and challenged their worldview. 

-Seth and Nicole Stokes

Hi guys, we just want to put a brief update and a prayer request out there. Please pray for us tomorrow (Friday), we have an opportunity to share in an inner-city public school about our ministry. This is an amazing opportunity and we do not want to take it for granted; we have to be sensitive about certain points (in regards to our faith), which is to be expected, but other than that, we get to talk about the logistics of living in another country in another culture and missions as a whole.

Many of you know where this world is at, one day our very faith will be put to the challenge and the freedom to say we are Christians will be taken away from us, but while today is still called today, let us rejoice and share about our Savior and what HE is doing overseas. This might be the only opportunity for kids to ever have and see that there is a life outside of the American “dream”, and that there is a world in-need, without any hope for their future. Yes, we have to be sensitive and be wise in how we share, but just coming in and sharing about our lives and that we are willing to give-up modern day conveniences and following the Hollywood drama and famous athletes will be so foreign to them, we might as well be speaking another language. This world and Satan have blinded so many people that while we share, we are guaranteed to see shocked faces that just don’t understand what we are talking about nor have any frame-of-reference to comprehend the message we will be sharing… both students or faculty. With all that being said, pray for us as we present. Pray that we are clear with our ministry and what missions is, pray that we are sensitive to what we “can” and cannot say, and pray God stirs in the hearts of both students and faculty that our God is BIG and HE is worthy of praise and our service, we have an option for this life outside of what our culture dictates to us.

We have been plugging away at the countless emails and logistics that it takes to get back overseas, especially when you don’t have the safety of a giant umbrella organization watching over you. In some aspects, it has made us depend more on God and depend more on each other, so we are grateful for that as well. We will post in the next day or two about some registries we put together and a donation-list, which many of you have been asking about, so stay tuned for that. As always, we love and appreciate you all!

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes.

It is crazy to think that we head back to Vanuatu next month; time flies and we just finished our last “tour”. We still speak every week except one in one-way or another (as of now). It has been great catching up with old friends and making new ones. God has been gracious to raise our monthly support over the past two years; He has been so faithful to us in this area we can honestly say, “We don’t worry about finances”. He has led us this far, why start being anxious now? During this last term (2 years) that we served, we were always around 90% monthly support and now as we wait to see people transfer to our new organization we project to be around the same percentage… maybe a little more? We will give that actual figure (percentage-wise) by the end of March once we have a consistent amount so that you all can know where we are standing in that particular area of our lives.

With that being said, as we were heading home for our first furlough, we knew we had to raise some substantial start-up costs for our full-time allocation into the tribe. Our monthly support keeps us in the day-in and day-out grind, but these initial, and Lord willing one-time, costs are too big to budget in a few short years. Most missionaries label this as projects or what not, and that is essentially what we are doing; making people aware of our project list. We can say by God’s grace alone He raised about 50% of our start-up funds in a short time and we haven’t technically made our needs list “public”. We have said pray for us in our needs, and several people have inquired more specifically, and then God uses them to achieve this goal. We have refrained from posting the actual project list because this is our Gideon-fleece per se; we are asking God to WOW us. He has been fulfilling this list piece-by-piece and to each of you who have been a part of that, we say thank you! God is using you and your sacrifice to show us His character and greatness. If we do not reflect upon Him at the end of this, then we are not focused on the right thing.

Which leads us to our being “overwhelmed by the gift” moment, the moment when we got overwhelmed by one of our supporting church’s and boy we were grateful that we were not asked to get up and publicly share afterwards. Our dear friends and a supporting church asked us about our needs this upcoming year. They took it seriously and prayed about what role God would have them to play in contributing towards our needs list. WATCH THEIR VIDEO HERE. Make sure to scroll down to their Facebook post post on February 13^th, 2017. They presented us with ALL the funds to purchase our solar-system (solar panels, batteries, and the equipment), and the funds for ALL of the materials for our house. WOW!!! Not much we can say other than THANK-YOU while chocking back the tears of joy at what God just did through this one church. What a total blessing! A church decided to in a sense, completely buy our house, basically to the dollar amount. Our God is too good to us!

Like we said God has been too gracious to us in the area of finances. We will keep everyone posted with our monthly % and our needs list %. But right now if we have to guess, we are at: monthly: 90%, needs list: 50%. Please pray we get this all taken care of before we head back, at the end of April. God uses people and prayer to work out His Divine will, and we take neither for granted. So in advance, thank you.

Please stay tuned to our blogs; we will be sharing about several other avenues to partner with us in the next week or so. We will be creating a donation list (with a registry) of items for us to take back to use for our ministry, so that we can fill this house God just supplied for us (ladies you understand that part). We are also putting together a work-crew list of those who want to come and help build our house at the end of the summer. We are trying to get all these pieces put together, so please pray for us to have wisdom in all of this planning.

We love and cherish you all! We greatly appreciate you and your partnership in our ministry. We are humbled to be your feet, to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes.

CLICK HERE TO GIVE NOW