Monthly Archives: December 2022

What types of food do you eat for special holidays? Mashed root foods are a must. This style with Taro is very common and everyone loves it. Better get some before it’s gone…

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your families (if the Lord allowed).

Many of you have asked what we did for Christmas or how our Christmas went… we hope this helps give you a glimpse of what Christmas was like for us this year…

Christmas (and New Year is celebrated the same) here is a long day and starts early. We have bread for breakfast as a community around 5am (which means Seth gets up way before that to bake it fresh) and then church begins at 7am (Seth teaches Sunday school class then the main service begins once Sunday school is over.)

We added a time of questions and prizes to make Sunday on Christmas more fun. After church was over, we had a big lunch with the community and once everyone had their fill, then everyone was off to the “mandatory siesta”.

Later that night, we have prayer study (as we usually do on Sunday nights), and then a time of prayer. We added a time of questions and prizes for the kids and youth to get them more excited for the night. This ended around 9pm… needless to say, it was a very different and busy Sunday for us this Christmas.

The following day, Monday, we celebrated our Christmas in a sense, called our family, and tried to reflect on the weekend God blessed us with to be a part of… truly, there is no end to ministering here in the bush. We are so thankful to be here!

Happy New Year to you all! 🎉 May the Lord conform us more into His image this next year and may we learn to be better ambassadors of His name in our daily lives. God bless you!

Seth & Nicole Stokes, your feet to the Tiale people

We wanted to share with you all how our Christmas Eve went…

We are so blessed to be able to do ministry and serve the Tiale people on this day. The day (and the whole weekend) was very special; from prayer with the pastors early in the morning (as we regularly do on Saturday mornings), to then hosting our language helpers and their families for a special end of the year meal (chicken wings, rice, and garden food)… we even brought a surprise! Ice cream! It was definitely a first for them to have ice cream in the village.

After the meal, Seth and the language helpers sat down and started working through 30 key words from the New Testament to find a general consensus on “what word” in Tiale will be best to use for both accuracy and comprehension for the translation.

It was a blessed day to be able to minister to our friends here and to work on the task of getting God’s Word into the Tiale language.

Thank you for your prayers and support!

Your feet to the Tiale people & the country of Vanuatu

~Seth & Nicole

In case any of you aren’t on social media and missed our post… we want to wish you all a very merry Christmas! We love you all and hope you and your family’s were able to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour in a special way.

There is always a bit of wanting to enjoy “traditional” Christmas festivities, but what a better way to celebrate Christmas than serving the Lord in a remote village to a people group who has yet to have the Bible in their language. There is no greater joy than seeing the spiritual fruit that God has produced in them. There is nothing else we would rather be doing, especially on Christmas.

Merry Christmas from our home to yours!

~Seth & Nicole Stokes

We hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving! There are so many things we can all be thankful for. We are so THANKFUL to be BACK here serving the Tiale people. Life here has been a bit of whirlwind, but a good one at that. There has been much fruit from the ministry here. Stay tuned as we will be making several posts soon about just what we mean by “fruit”. Also, we are trying to post more photos on our Instagram account so check it out to see more pics @stokingthefires.

There are many areas in which we still find ourselves adjusting: the language, relationships, house maintenance, property upkeep, the climate, the isolation and the constant work of discipleship… Click on the link below to read our latest newsletter…

We truly appreciate all of you whom we represent, here in the country of Vanuatu,

~Your feet to the Tiale people & the Country of Vanuatu,

-Seth & Nicole Stokes