Summertime... And the living is ... busy

 

Pineapple with 6 tops!

    Ok, so tomorrow is actually the first day of summer. Plus, our kids aren't even out of school yet (but I am counting down the minutes until Friday at 12pm!). However, just like most of you, we have been experience high heat and very "summery" weather. Normally I would complain, just a little, about the high temperatures, but the US heat wave sounds crazy! So I will hold off, at least until you all start posting about fall and boots and lattes, and I'm still sitting down here drenched in sweat and praying the electricity doesn't go out so the air conditioner and fans keep blowing. (How October can be hotter than August I will never understand, but it will be our 6th autumn on the island so I just accept that it is what it is.)

    Thankfully, the shift in weather has just been in the last few weeks. We finished up our spring-like winter with a lot of great ministry and fun. As you all know, a picture is worth a thousand words. While I could easily write one thousand words about the last three months, for your sakes, I will choose to tell these stories in mostly photos instead.

Easter

    Addy and Dean kicked off the holiday celebrations at school with a visit from the Easter Bunny. While ol' EB isn't a big part of our family's celebrations, I love every chance I get to see photos of their school life. It reminds me that the world is big, and that God is even bigger. It reminds me that His is the God of St. Kitts, India, Europe, Canada, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, the US, and every single other country and city and people. 

       CCF has a longstanding tradition of a Good Friday worship service at the beach. As with so many things, covid put that on pause. This year we were able to bring it back, and it was very sweet!

    Easter morning we had church! I love the photo of Dean and a friend dancing to the music. Aaron spoke on how circumstances may look one way, BUT God comes in and can change everything!

Family Photos

Birthday Fun

    Our wonderful friend, and co-worker, Marlo had his birthday in April. Celebrating with people is one of the best parts of our work. We get to invite people in, love on them, get to know them better, and we get to share the heart of Christ with them in a different way. Whether it's the one being celebrated, or the friends who come to join in, building relationships is a huge part of the work we are doing.

Saying Goodbye

    In contrast, saying goodbye is probably one of the hardest things. It's the nature of living here, people come and they go. We had to say goodbye to three different, but truly amazing, women. These vet students all headed back to the US to pursue their next steps in their careers. These women not only attended CCF, but they each served in the church, loved on people around them, and were such a blessing to be around and to know. We miss them, but we are excited to see what God has next for them!

Celebrate Recovery

We had an adventurous evening at Celebrate Recovery when we arrived to set up and they was no power to the building! Power outages, referred to in St. Kitts are "the current gone", are fairly common. However, the centre we meet in rarely experiences them because it's close to downtown. We made the most of it and ate our soup and enjoyed longer fellowship outside. We even got to watch the repairman on the telephone pole and we all cheered and clapped for him when the power came back on!

    One of the most exciting pieces of news we have is that Yamarlor and Shackila Dorsett have been hired by Caribbean Christian Fellowship! This amazing couple has taken on running Celebrate Recovery, CCF & CR social media, community connections and out reach, overseeing the worship team, and helping to connect with and disciple people from our congregation. Aaron and I are still involved at CR, still help lead small groups, and are still working to bring CR back to the prison, New Horizons, and to spread it to other churches and communities here in the federation. The Dorsetts taking on these positions is allowing our ministries to have a broader reach in St Kitts!

Caribbean Christian Fellowship

    Praying before church is something we established several years ago. It's such a blessing to see young adults show up early to petition God to move in our service each week!

    Aaron wrapped up the books of James and Jude, and now we are diving into the Gospel of Luke. We have a kids section in the back where the kids join us for worship before heading upstairs. In CCF kids, we work to provide the same message as the adults downstairs, but at a level and in a way that makes sense to kids and young teens. We are praying that the amount of families at our church continues to increase, and that we can see more and more kids come to understand how to have a growing relationship with God.

    It's a real joy to see people hanging out after church, getting to know each other better, and getting involved in each other's lives. Church is about so much more than a sermon and some songs. 

    In light of that, we have a Life Group that meets every Wednesday. We have 15-20 people come and sit in our living room to laugh, joke, share, and discuss the Word of God together. We started the book of Revelation last month, and it has been so interesting to hear the perspectives and thoughts of people raised in many different ways and in many different places. Our animals enjoy all the extra attention too.

    I got to take two of the ladies from church on a small tour of the island! We stopped at Brimstone Hill Fortress and talked about our shared loved of history, growing up homeschooled, and how God had moved in each of our lives. Building relationships will forever be my favorite part of ministry.

    We got to celebrate with our friend Drew as she decided to get baptized and declare publicly her faith in Jesus! Drew has been saved for several years, but things kept getting in the way of her baptism (including that little world wide pandemic). She decided not to put it off, and asked us if she could do it here. It was so awesome to gather and celebrate this step with her! Plus, what beats getting baptized in the calm, warm, Caribbean sea?

Real Life Real Impact

    As most of you know, a big part of our church's ministry is to students at ROSS University of Veterinary Medicine. In fact, our church birthed out of a club call Christian Veterinary Fellowship (CVF). Our close ties with this club has meant that a lot of our church attenders are students; young men and women far away from home, doing an intense academic program, and often right at the stage of life where they are wresting with what they truly believe. It's an incredible group to get to serve! CVF's parent organization, Christian Veterinary Mission (CVM), does tons of amazing things to serve vet students and professionals, including these three day conferences call Real Life Real Impact.

    CVM's team consisted of four vets who pay their own way to come, and one CVM staff member who is also a pastor. The team puts on a professional development weekend, laced with their own stories of their walks with God and the role that plays in their practices and lives. CVM's Pastor Curtiss, as well as Aaron, also shared messaged about grace at the conference. RLRI not only blesses the CVF club, but they walk all over campus inviting other students, they pay for all the food and materials, and they provide support for these young men and women as they start out in their new careers.

    One of my favorite parts of RLRI is that the CVM team comes to our church on Sunday morning! Curtiss preached, and the organization payed for a lovely brunch for our entire church! All the vets who came down have been to St. Kitts before, and some have been coming longer than we have lived here. Their friendship and the relationships they develop here are such a testimony to great short-term missions!

St Kitts Life

    We experienced another St Kitts first this year - The Agricultural Fair! We saw plants and produce from around the island, booths about the local wildlife, horses, businesses that use local resources or help to protect the local environment, and best of all - really yummy food! We tried rabbit kabobs, jackfruit tacos, and casava cakes. Aaron even tasted a bite of tree mutton, which is really monkey stew!

    Addalyn and the other girls from her class enjoying a movie for a friend's birthday! Movies here are much more interactive than at home. It's common for people to talk at the screen and comment out loud as they experience the film. Theses teenagers had a lot of fun.

Dean and his class enjoying a movie day at school, and a field trip to a local farm!

    Mother's day picnic breakfast at the kids school! First time I've set foot on campus since before covid. 

    Mother's Day at church! Such a sweet group of ladies and their children. My kids made me feel so special!

    Covid made it's way back to St. Kitts again. This is the bus that came to test Dean's entire class! Praise God, they were all negative. Even with the newest wave, it seem the country has finally decided to move forward with covid as a part of life. School stayed open, mask regulations remained mostly lifted, and people keep going about their lives fairly normally.

    The amazing Shackila, who is in charge of community connections for CCF and CR, agreed to teach a painting class for children at another church. Her husband, Marlo, and I came to help volunteer and support her. We were able to start building friendships with the volunteers from the other church, and Shackila made about 20 kids super happy by teaching them how to paint an adorable smiling cactus!

    Yesterday we got to celebrate Father's Day! It's so much fun to celebrate Aaron, especially for what an incredible dad he is. After church we took him to the beach, ate a yummy lunch, and enjoyed some much-needed time in the sun and waves. 

    Unfortunately, this weekend was also smack-dab in the middle of finals for our kiddos. So we spent the evening studying and preparing for the last set of exams this week. We can not wait til Friday and for summer break to finally be here!

    If you have made it to the end of this update, thank you for reading and sharing with us in the stories of what God is doing. I'd like to leave you with a Psalm that God has had on my heart these past several weeks. 

    When they read it to us daily in mission training, it took a while for the words and their correlation to our lives to fully sink in. Day by day, our hearts relaxed and we could understand them more and more.

    I think that, even now, seeing how things change and shift and how little we can control anything, the words of this psalm are speaking comfort to me once again:

O Lord, you have examined my heart 

and know everything about me. 

You know when I sit down or stand up. 

You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. 

You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. 

You know everything I do. 

You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord . 

You go before me and follow me. 

You place your hand of blessing on my head. 

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, 

too great for me to understand! 

I can never escape from your Spirit! 

I can never get away from your presence! 

If I go up to heaven, you are there; 

if I go down to the grave, you are there. 

If I ride the wings of the morning, 

if I dwell by the farthest oceans, 

even there your hand will guide me, 

and your strength will support me. 

I could ask the darkness to hide me 

and the light around me to become night— 

but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. 

To you the night shines as bright as day. 

Darkness and light are the same to you. 

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body 

and knit me together in my mother’s womb. 

Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! 

Your workmanship is marvelous—

how well I know it. 

You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, 

as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. 

You saw me before I was born. 

Every day of my life was recorded in your book. 

Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.

Psalms 139:1-16

We love you all!