Hello all!
We hope your last couple months have been good--ours have and we are excited to share some of it with you!
In our last update, we had just started the September DTS, which was the first international school we have had in a few years. The 11 weeks of lecture phase have absolutely FLOWN by, but have been filled with joy, growth, breakthrough, and seeing God’s redemption and heart on display.
We have really enjoyed continuing to disciple the staff and encourage them in their discipleship of the students and their own leadership roles within the school and community. We are continuing to learn how to best support, care for, and lead our DTS leaders, but we feel that the staff team is made up of some of the best our generation has to offer--full of passion, soft hearts, excitement, and teachability. This is a huge part of the joy we have in getting to be involved in the DTS ministry!
The school overall has gone very smoothly and wonderfully. An area we did experience ‘hiccups’ in was the cost and limited availability of flights to the nations we send our outreach teams to. It was beautiful to see God’s provision in this for each of the students and staff. There were some amazing miracles like over $4,000 dollars coming in overnight—the night before the flight money was due to the travel agency! These moments test our faith as individuals and a community, but the reality is that things like this aren’t just isolated events. We personally experience the provision of God every single month as He works through the faithful supporters who give every month. Everyone lives by faith in one way or another but seeing God’s provision over the course of this school has really helped us learn to place our faith in God even more.
In the beginning of October, we were able to have an all-base staff retreat—something we used to do every year, but haven’t in a few years because of covid. It was so special being able to have a weekend where around 60 of us gathered to pray, worship, seek realignment with God, direction, connection, and unity, while of course also having lots of fun and eating great food! There was such sweet moments of connection, and restoring of relationship/ the desire for close relationship that happened. I’m sure many of you can relate with how easily we can become self-reliant in ways, or even slowly shy away from community or others out of fear of rejection or just out of busyness! This seemed to be a theme God was specifically bringing up and and helping us through over this weekend.
At the end of October, we were gifted a ‘babymoon’ where we were able to go away for 3 days and 2 nights to an Airbnb on the beach. The time was so special—we felt so incredibly full of gratitude, love, and rest. The time felt longer than it was and within the first 4 hours, we felt so at ease and totally relaxed! We both agree it was one of the best holidays we have ever had. We felt so loved by God and the friends that gifted it to us. We came back from this time feeling so at peace, relaxed, deeply connected together, and just ‘set up for success’ for the months ahead. This deep peace has really continued to stay with us. In the midst of very busy schedules and various challenges, stress and anxiety have not made their way in, as we have felt drenched in the supernatural peace of our heavenly father.
We have just sent out the last of the outreach teams, and they are now in three different nations—Uganda, a North African country (we cannot mention the name for security), and Nepal—for the next 8 weeks. What each team will be doing will look different, as they are partnering with local believers and missionaries, some which we already have long-term connection with. We are expectant for God to move through and in the teams during this time, and we will be excited to share some of the stories and testimonies we receive from them with you all!
During the ‘covid season’ we felt God speak some specific direction and strategy for how outreaches would look going forward when international borders opened again. So we had time to pray into this, bring it before our base leader, and plan! We felt God wanted to bring together the combination of strategy of missions and the beautiful freedom to be led by the Spirit that has been such a huge part of YWAM becoming one of the largest mission movements. We have a number of families that have been ‘sent out’ from our base, with a heart for specific nations and to be planted there with a. longterm mindset. In the past we have often felt quite disconnected from these families, and they us. So we started by creating more connection, having regular updates from them to show to the base at worship times, regular times of intercession for them, and even created a team where every family has an individual ‘assigned’ to them from our base, that reaches out for updates, prayer requests, and general checking in (this layout was actually inspired by the system that our home and sending church, ELmbrook, has set up for its field workers, including us!).
Seeing the value of strategy, continued connection, with longterm workers was saying really pressed upon us, as the reality is our teams our short term, only going for 2 months. So now, every school, each outreach team will spend minimum 1 month of their outreach with one of our bases ‘sent out’, pouring into the ministries they already have going, building up and encouraging the local believers and local leadership in the churches in those areas. We currently have 5 of these target ‘places’ with families already in them, some that have been there close to 10 years, others that have just been sent a few months ago!
The last week of the lecture phase, we had the privilege to teach on the topic of healthy relationships (all while Karis was in her 37th week of pregnancy). As we prayed and prepared, we felt to focus on a few specific areas of relationships. We started by discussing the foundations of healthy relationships by talking about growth with God and having a pure heart. Then we went through some of the specific areas of relationship including family relationships, romantic relationships, and relationships within the body of Christ. Because it was the week before the outreach teams left, we had felt specifically to do quite a bit of teaching and times of prayer and sharing within the outreach teams. Our hope was to prepare them with some specific relational tools for the intense 8 weeks that outreach presents. In our experience, when a team is solid, unified, and marked by love for each other, everything else goes well—ministry included.
Halfway through the week of teaching, Sam began to feel unwell, and we both tested positive for Covid (not much later, we started to realize that there was a few other cases in the YWAM community). This threw us a bit of a curveball, but we experienced God’s grace so much through it. Using Zoom, we were able to do the last two days of teaching from home. We were sad to have to do ‘waving over the fence’ goodbyes to the students and staff as they left for outreach this weekend, but it was still so exciting seeing them head off in anticipation and unity!
We got to see the beauty of the body of Christ in this time, as our community was so quick to love us by taking care of some of our practical needs while we isolated. Groceries dropped off, meals brought, flowers, gifts for baby girl, even Uber Eats coffee sent to our gate! We continue to be so thankful for the family He has put around us while being away from family. We also were prayerful that baby girl would stay put while we had covid, as labouring with covid did not seem fun, isolating in the hospital room would not be ideal, and most importantly we want her to be safe and not expose her to covid as a new born. We are both feeling significantly better now and were very grateful that our symptoms stayed much more mild than last time we had COVID!
Now that most of the staff and the students have been sent on outreach, we are recovering, and we are officially less than 2 weeks away from baby’s due date, it will be challenging to make any definite plans, but for now, we are going to do as much preparation and planning as possible with one of the school leaders for the January DTS . We are also enjoying getting our apartment all cleaned up and ready for baby.
Once she does come, we have a very nice adjustment period until mid-January. During this time, most of our responsibilities are lessened, and we are also more flexible with our schedule to have meetings in our living room and many administrative duties from home. We see the perfectness of this timing, and are grateful God knew exactly what He was doing (:
Karis has continued to have a lovely pregnancy, has felt healthy, and for the most part had good energy throughout. She has especially enjoyed pouring into the girl staff these past months and wants to continue to grow in really serving them well.
Sam’s ankle has been slow to heal, but gradually Sam has returned to working out regularly, which has helped him feel stronger overall and more himself. Sam is feeling more fulfilled than ever in what missions looks like for him right now. He is seeing more clearly God’s goodness in the time of waiting and preparation for our baby.
Together, it has been a sweet and special few months, enjoying the fullness of what we do day to day, while also feeling increasingly excited for this coming season and the transitions, challenges, growth and joy that will come with it.
We are so grateful for each of you, thank you for keeping up with us, and for all your love and support!
Samuel and Karis
School photo
Base bbq at the park
DTS camping trip
Praying for the nations
Worship at the staff retreat
Sam and some staff at a 'elders bingo night' we put on for the DTS and SBS students (everyone dressed up and played bingo haha)
what our last two days teaching over zoom with covid looked like
hanging at the wavehouse (before it got hot!)
Team Uganda
Team Nepal
Team North Africa
The baby shower that some amazing friends put on for Karis!
On our babymoon
Indie guarding his sisters room
Some maternity photos a dear friend blessed us with!
another
2 large stingrays hanging out at the river across from our apartment
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