September 2015

Greetings to all,

This month has been one of much change, but we enter this new season with great hope. Thanks for your prayers.

Cy’s health
Shortly after we wrote the last update (I believe it was the following day) Cy broke her toe. It’s been a year of health problems over and over again, but she’s slowly getting back to health. We believe that it’s a lot of spiritual warfare because it’s like Loren Cunningham once said, “By committing to get the Bible into the world you are declaring war!” Cy’s nerve problems have mostly healed. It only hurts now when she plays guitar (please pray for that). Her toe is getting better. It just takes time to heal. Thank God that through it all we have not had to stop in our service to our Lord. Cy continues to play guitar through the pain.

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Elias started school
August 31st was the first day of school for our son, Elias. He was so happy and returns home excited about school everyday.

We’re so pleased with CRICS (Chiang Rai International Christian School) and the environment that they are providing the kids. All the teachers are 100% volunteer and receive no financial help, which means they are there and they are teaching because they are called by God to do so. The quality of the teaching and discipleship (teachers are disciplers) is very high. The school is also highly Christ-centered and mission-focused, which is the culture that we desire our son to grow up in. The cost is average for international schools in Thailand and, though it is way out of our current budget, God has proven faithful to provide for our son. We have monthly payments of $400CDN and so far we have been able to meet those payment deadlines faithfully. If you’d like to donate towards Elias’ education/discipleship, please click here.

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Testimonies of the Thai SourceView Bibles in Thailand
There are so many testimonies that we could share with you about how God is using this Bible to reach out to people around us.

Here are a couple more…

1. Rob had been reaching out to a local shop owner. He had tried to share about Jesus on multiple occasions, but was always met with a certain resistance. One day Rob gave her the book and told her that it will bring hope to her life. After a month they met again and Rob asked how she was doing with the book. She said, “I’ve read about half of the book. It gives me so much hope and I love the way it is written. I like it a lot, but I don’t think I’m able to apply all of it to my life. I just try to apply little bits at a time.” This lady, named Nii, has already read more than half of the gospels in a month and she’s trying to apply it to her life. Can you imagine if YOUR neighbours did that?
2. I heard from a fellow missionary about her staff group that uses the Thai SourceView Bible. Apparently every day in the afternoon at around 2pm her staff, which are all different people who live in Thailand (tribal, Burmese, Thais, etc.), get together and read a portion of the Scripture together. They lead themselves, use the back to guide their study and have great discussions. They comment on finally understanding the Bible because the version is in a language that is easy to understand. One neat thing is that one of her staff can’t read, but he sits in on the reading and learns with them. It has been such a good experience for them that they read through the whole thing in 2 months. They had an idea (which I never thought of) to split up their group after they finished reading, buy more sets of these Bibles and go and start new groups. Her original 8 staff have now begun new groups of 4 or more people, including family, church members and even non-Christians. So now there are at least 32 people reading these Bibles from that one initial group. Could there be 128 people before Christmas (if each one starts a new group)? Pray for that!
3. There were four Thai leaders (Gift, Pang, Noi & Yung) who went to the YWAM Together gathering in Townsville, Australia. Phil had brought some Thai SourceView Bibles to show at the gathering and then left them with the four ladies. They were walking through the streets one day and met a Thai lady who lives in that city. She invited them over to her house and they had a meal together. While they were at the table, they pulled out their SourceView Bibles and started reading them out loud for the lady to listen to the story.

   

   After reading for a while they started to talk about Jesus to the lady and led her to the Lord. Now she’s a follower of Jesus. God used the Thai SourceView Bible to lead a Thai lady in Australia to know Him…AMAZING!

   

4. On September 29th our YWAM family in Chiang Rai gathered together in a local market, setup a screen and projector, started the Jesus Film and handed out almost 800 Bibles to the people in our neighbourhood. The 800 Bibles were gone in just 2 1/2 hours! How many people are going to read the Bible for the first time? How many are going to wonder why they had to wait so long to get this truth? How many untold testimonies of the glory of God are going to come about through this distribution of Bibles? Click here for some pictures.

   

Let’s print more Bibles
As we give out Bibles, we have a 1 minute video that shows how to use these Bibles. Check out the English version:

We are almost out of the 8,000 Bibles that we originally printed in May of this year. There is a growing interest in different churches and ministries around the nation to give these Bibles away in their Christmas programs. We have some of the money raised from selling some Bibles, but we still need to raise another $14,700CDN ($11,000USD). This will allow us to print another 8,000 Bibles. If you’d like to give towards this, click here.

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PRAYER REQUESTS:
1. Health for Cy and protection from future problems for each one of us.
2. Finances (we’re trusting God to increase our monthly support to cover the expenses of our son going to school, we need another $400CDN/month just for that) – click here to give
3. To be able to print more Bibles for distribution in Thailand
4. Wisdom and spiritual sensitivity to understand how to lead our community into this next season of kingdom-seeking.

Thanks for walking with us through the journey of seeking God’s kingdom in Thailand through obedience to what He tells us to do.
BLESSINGS!