Overwhelmed By The Gift!

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!

Pastor and his wife from Noblesville

Receiving the Gift

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.

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