Taught to teach or teach to be taught?

I (Jenn) think that sometimes God asks us to teach the things we need to learn. I've heard another missionary here in Hungary say that, "God doesn't call the most holy to the mission field, only those that have the most stubborn hearts and require the most extreme circumstances to become pliable.". For my part, I couldn't agree more.

As my 8th grade health class has been working it's way through this last unit, Dealing with Stress and Grief, I have been reminding myself as much as I have been teaching the students how to manage their time to prevent stress, "Recharge" to decrease stress, grieve the losses involved with living the TCK life, being familiar with patterns of life transition and expressing their emotions in a healthy, respectful way.

In developing this unit I pulled from the materials we collected during the two years of preparation we had before coming to Hungary. Many of the materials I used are part of WorldVenture and the Association of Christian Schools International training programs, but I was also able to pull from my personal transition experience which is still underway.  As I cried my way through the lesson on grieving the losses involved in life change, I spoke the words I needed to hear most about the nearness of God to those who weep. It is true that God often teaches us so that we can in turn teach others, but it is also true that sometimes God asks us to teach others so that we can  understand what he has been doing in us.

Thankfully, I am not the only one learning life lessons in the Health classroom. One student left my classroom in tears during the lesson on stress management and returned later to thank me for teaching on that subject because it was just what she needed.  In between the lessons on grief and life transitions I was told that one of our students will be moving back to her passport country after 11 years in Hungary.   When I collected the writing assignment on addressing unresolved grief, I found that near half the class had turned in a blank sheet of paper because the feelings they had uncovered were too personal to share. Some of the students simply wrote, "thank you" instead.

That's what I want to write too.  Thank you. Thank you Lord for teaching us all so patiently and for teaching us so that we can give these TCKs the tools they need to navigate life successfully. Thank you, friends, for teaming up to pray for us and support us financially so that we can all impact eternity.

His and Her Classrooms

And We're Off! 

A new school year begins at ICSB 

Dave's Classroom ready for students!

Dave began his career at ICSB this week with 6th grade keyboarding, 7th grade Ancient World History and 8th grade Medieval World History.  He has 66 students from 11 countries including Hungary (30%), the U.S.A. (40%), Korea, China, Albania, Canada, Bulgaria, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Finland. Many of these students (20 %) are ELL, or English Language Learners. Whew!  While the lesson planning for such a diverse class has been daunting, Dave is off to a great start.  He has already heard from some of the parents that their students are excited about history for the first time.  He also has his homeroom class, one section of the eighth grade, for devotions every morning.  We are very excited to begin the school year, begin building relationships with these students and take our first steps in the role God called us to several years ago. 

Introducing Mrs. Kelley

Do you remember when Jenn wrote an update about how God has specifically called her to foreign missions?  (If you don't you can find the link to the post at the end of the e-mail.) Several months ago she shared some of the things God had been doing in her heart regarding future ministry opportunities.  She ventured to suggest that teaching a health class may be in her future.  We had no idea when she wrote that post, or when we arrived in Hungary, or even when Dave started back at school that this opportunity would be coming our way this term!  There was a need for an 8th grade health teacher and with Jenn's experience and education as an RD she was a perfect fit. She couldn't be more excited about the content of the course, working with the students or working with such a handsome colleague. (She means Dave.  He is the 8th grade social studies teacher in case you forgot...)

Annora and Allister at the Ovoda

The course meets just twice a week for 45 minutes each class.  The older kids will be able to spend the day at the Ovoda (sort of like a Hungarian preschool) on those days and Anna will nap at a friend's house.  This allows Jenn to engage our students in a structured way without loss to our family.  The house may not be as clean, but we are
focusing on the eternal things. We are giving thanks and glory to God for providing the resources necessary to step into this role before he placed the desire in Jenn's heart, for changing Jenn's heart about teaching before there was a need and for his timing in introducing the need.  We serve a good God who leaves his fingerprints in the details                                                           of our lives if we will but watch for them.

Click here to check out the blog Jenn wrote about herself titled "More than an Accompanying Spice."

Working Through Spaghetti-Squash Brain

What is it about moving that makes you feel so tired? Aside from all the physical labor involved in packing up house and relocating, what makes your brain feel  like an overcooked spaghetti squash? In part the mental fatigue of moving is due to our inability to do as much on “autopilot”.  When you move to a new place, you can’t drive home, pay a bill, or get groceries without thinking through every step.  In moving to a new country we've been dealing with these changes and more. Let’s take grocery shopping for instance.

In Cheyenne grocery shopping was as simple as driving to the grocery store once per week, buying my usual brands of the items on my list, waiting and paying at the checkout and pushing my cart full of bagged groceries back to my car, driving it home and stocking the fridge and cabinets.


In Budapest grocery shopping requires writing the meal plan based on what we know to be available and what size of pan will fit in our “fun size” oven. (Thank you 4 yr. old Annora for adding scale to our pictures.) Then we need to collect the grocery buggy and head to the bus stop.  After a 20 minute ride to the grocery store nearby we need to carefully walk up and down every aisle often checking each variety of an item and consulting a dictionary to make sure we are in fact buying wheat flour and not laundry starch.  When buying produce we must use a computerized program (in Hungarian) to print labels for each fruit or vegetable. At the Checkout we have to follow the rules regarding emptying the cart, count out Hungarian forints and quickly bag our own groceries in bags we brought from home.  Loaded grocery buggy in hand we take the bus home.  The whole trip takes about two hours. We also need to make three or more 30 minute trips through the open vegetable market during the week because our fridge is small and produce will spoil quickly if left out. 

Hopefully this example gives you an idea of the scope and magnitude of the challenge we face crossing cultures.  Each day challenges our assumptions about how life should work. Just as we have shared our journey up to this point – with all the ups and downs – we want to continue giving you an inside look at the cross-cultural life of ministry through our eyes. We are so glad we are here and love learning all the ins and outs of living in the country God has called us to– even if we have to bag our own groceries.

The Month in Review!
We have been in Hungary for 6 weeks.   The first week we spent overcoming jetlag and unpacking our trunks into our duplex. The second and third weeks were largely spent making careful purchases for our new home and learning how to navigate the public transportation system.  It was also the third week the kids started óvoda (like a Hungarian preschool) and we discovered tejföl does not mean yogurt like we thought! (It is sour cream and we ate it on our granola for a week thinking, “wow this yogurt tastes like sour cream!” If it looks like a duck… We blame it on culture shock.) During weeks four through six, we have battled the flu and have been attending language school. Week five we are all healthy and have finally figured out when to put out the recycling.  We will finish language school this week and are excited for Dave to begin at ICSB on August 14^th and students to arrive August 27^th.

Devotional

Below is a devotional sent to us by our sending agency, WorldVenture. I thought it was so well said, I decided to post it on our blog for others to benefit from as well. Jenn and I are beginning to comprehend this type of life as we watched God do the impossible when we, and so many of you, decided to ask in prayer!

Enjoy.

Dear Mission Family,

One of the implications of living in the shadow of the cross is understanding what it means to pray, think and live supernaturally.  I believe it is the heart of sanctification.  We are to live by the power of the Spirit of God.  But how easy it is for us to forget.

A good friend met with me recently and announced that he is a genuine apostate.  He has left the faith.  This friend has a dramatic conversion story, many examples of powerful Spirit work in and through him, and he is a seminary grad and former pastor.  But he has tossed it all aside believing now that present reality is the only thing that ensures peace in this life.  The supernatural, including an inerrant Word of God, Jesus as the Son of God and even the hope of eternity for him is gone. 

I wonder if my friend doesn't actually reflect my own challenge of trying to live my life apart from faith in the supernatural.  For my friend, it is now intentional; for me it is simply that it comes unSpiritually natural. 

Kind of like the disciples when the 5,000 men and more were listening to the Master.  "Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here." 

That was an excellent response to a very real problem.  The disciples might even have had some concern for the crowd and were giving a very reasonable solution.  Jesus could have agreed with their plan and dismissed the crowd.  However, that solution would not have taught them to live supernaturally.  And so Jesus replies, "YOU give them something to eat."  Immediately they were forced into the realm of the supernatural.  Using the best language of my Missouri roots we would say, "Ain't no way no how!"  True, but it IS the way to live, think and pray.  Jesus encourages us to operate in the realm of the supernatural.

I wonder how often I roll through my day not even thinking about what God might want to do through me that is impossible without his intervention.  Perhaps I've developed a habit of measuring every challenge by my capacity rather than by God's.  Perhaps I've even applied that to the capacity of my WorldVenture department or our WorldVenture impact in the world.  "Oh, we can't do that.  We don't have enough..." you fill in the blank.  And so there it lies, dead in the human capacity pool because we fail to pray supernaturally.  We don't even give God a chance to say no!

I think it was Martin Luther who once said, "I've got so much to do today it will take two hours of prayer to get it all done."  There was a man who understood the difference between personal or organizational capacity and supernatural prayer.  Would you care to try it on for size this month?  Actually, it never fits; you don't have the capacity!  But why not test this supernatural God with some supernatural prayer?  Reopen that "ain't no way no how" folder and see if your prayer can match your God.  And don't forget to act if God whispers back, "YOU give them something to eat!"

Doug Hazen

Regional Mission Director

Northwest Regional Connections

Clearance!

Friends, we are so excited to tell you that we have received clearance from WorldVenture headquarters to leave for Hungary! We will keep this update brief because we are up to our eyeballs in packing, sorting, organizing, phone calls and cleaning in addition to attempting to maintain some semblance of sanity.

Let us share just a few of the amazing ways God has been working during the past month to make our departure possible:

Week 1: Three families that has previously told us they would not become financial partners contacted us to tell us God has instructed them to join our support team and wanted to know how to do so!

Week 2: Two students of Dave's, one from his time at Wheatland Bible Church and one from Laramie County Community College joined our financial team for a huge boost in our monthly support!

Week 3: A group of three sisters prayed about giving, pooled all their money, including their cherished $2.00 bill, and told their parents they wanted to send it in to WorldVenture so that "The Kelleys can help the hungries".

Week 4: Wheatland Bible Church prayed during their Sunday morning prayer time that we would have the funds needed for clearance to leave for Hungary and within 24 hours we did!

The ways in which God has been providing for this coming term in Hungary keep surprising and delighting us. He has written us a beautiful love letter composed of the last several weeks. We couldn't begin to share all the stories of faith and generosity in one update, but we did want to share just a few and give our gracious Master all the credit. We are so honored to be on this faith-journey with all of you and pray you are encouraged.

We are still in need of more people to give financially on a regular/monthly basis in order to reach full support.  If becoming a monthly financial partner is something God has laid on your heart, please do so. You can sign up online on WorldVenture's website. Please contact us if you have any questions.

We will be leaving for Hungary June 24th! We will be making stops at four churches along the Front Range leading up to our departure. We would love to see you before we leave, unfortunately we will not be able to meet with everyone.  If you would like to join these congregations in commissioning our family to the mission field, please consider attending one of the following services. 

May 26th - 10:30 at Christ Center Community Church in Fort Collins,CO
June 2nd  -   9:30 at Calvary Evangelical Free Church in Broomfield, CO
June 9th   - 10:45 at Wheatland Bible Church in Wheatland, WY
June 16th -   9:00am , 11:00am and 6:00 pm at Element Church in Cheyenne, WY

We hope to see you there!

More Than the Accompanying Spice

(Plus a quick financial update at the end)

The Call

I can remember the moment I felt God begin to call me to foreign missions.  It was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. It was a tugging I couldn't ignore.  After four short-term trips to Mexico I knew it was time for the next step.  A year later I stepped off a plane to begin a summer-long internship with a missionary family in eastern Asia.  Shadowing and participating in the day-to-day activities of missionaries was eye opening and challenging.  It wasn't all romance and adventure. It was hard and it was lonely. God spoke to my heart in eastern Asia and made it clear that he was asking me to serve him in full-time, foreign missions.  I said yes, though I did mourn what I thought would be the sacrifice of a husband and family. There are not a lot of eligible bachelors on the mission field.  Just saying "I'm planning to work as a missionary after I graduate" generally clears the vicinity of any would-be wooers. Has anyone else noticed this? Just me? Well anyway, I was committed and I planned to head overseas after finishing my food science and human nutrition degree at Colorado State University.

Obviously God had other plans on the family front and I am thankful he did.

 I met Dave on my last short-term trip to Mexico and besides his good looks, I was drawn to him by his shared burden to reach the up and coming generations for Christ.  We are both passionate about life mentoring.  I'll define life mentoring as being involved in the everyday activities of students with the intention of guiding them to become all God designed them to be while modeling an authentic life of faith. God picked out a wise, dedicated and selfless man to be my husband, leader and partner in ministry.  I'm so grateful I get to be his wife and serve on the foreign field next to him, but even if God hadn't brought Dave, I would still be going.

My Role

I am more than the accompanying spice to Dave's classroom ministry. While my goals on the home front are also to encourage and equip believing students, live the gospel for all to see and support the missionaries, these goals take slightly different shape for me. First, we have our own little third-culture kids (TCKs) to equip and encourage towards a Christ-centered adulthood.  If I (we) neglect them and their discipleship, our ministry to other TCKs falls flat like a chubby toddler in the Wyoming wind. Second, by serving our own TCKs we model to our students what a Jesus-following family looks like.  Sometimes it isn't pretty, but we do have Christ and the gospel makes a difference in how we live. The way our family does life also impacts the missionary community around us and it is my goal to be an encouraging, loving, helpful co-laborer.

Better Together

Watching Dave as a father and husband as well as their teacher gives Dave important credibility with his students, makes him more approachable and paves the way for meaningful conversations about life and faith. Dave is more effective in the classroom because we serve as a unit with complementary roles. Not to mention the fact that it will be easier for Dave to make a difference in the lives of our students if he has clean-ish clothes, is fed and is the beneficiary of what I generally call "domestic support." When not being about the business of  nurturing our young kids and keeping our household running proficiently, if not smoothly, I plan to engage with our students by supporting them at extracurricular events, helping out in the classroom, opening up our home to them as family life allows, and eventually facilitating small groups for girls. Who knows? A nutrition, science or health course might even be in my future!

Clearing A Major Hurdle

By the way, did you hear that we are 91% funded?! God is moving in incredible ways and he keeps taking us by surprise. We can now begin the process of securing tickets to Hungary! However, we will not be cleared to actually board the plane and leave the U.S.A. until we are 100% funded.  Please join us in continuing to pray towards the remaining 8.76% of our funding.  Considering  a monthly pledge or lump sum financial gift to further our ministry to TCKs? Follow this link to sign up!

A Point of Urgency: Why We Must be in Hungary This Fall

With only 60 days until our target departure date to Hungary, Jenn and I have pressed into the heart of God in prayer and, we have been filled with an ever-increasing God-given confidence that we will soon be in Hungary. Jenn and I know we were uniquely created for such a time as this!

I am a TCK

I am well suited for the task of ministering to third–culture kids (TCKs) because I am a TCK. I lived in Latin America during my junior-high and early high-school years. The experience molded me in both positive and negative ways.

The Good

Positively, I made life-long friends while I was overseas. My kids call one such friend Uncle, and I am proud to call him brother. I also see the world differently than most people who have never lived the TCK life. When I hear of events taking place, I am able to see many facets of the issue because I know how to empathize with people on every side. I can differentiate between that which is simply different and that which is truly a matter of right and wrong.

The Bad

Negatively, I, as a natural introvert, learned to isolate myself rather than face the emotional pain of saying goodbye. I learned goodbyes were not as painful if I did not get as attached. This also led to an increased difficulty in expressing my emotions...at all! Thankfully, I have learned – and am still learning – how to overcome these negatives through the power of Christ so only the positives remain.

The Redeemed

My experiences as a TCK uniquely prepare me to minister to these students. I understand first-hand the joys and challenges of living the TCK life because of my experiences. With over 20 different nationalities represented at ICSB, I will be able to use my cross-cultural skills to effectively communicate with the diverse student population. These skills will make me a more effective mentor and teacher.

A Passion for Teens

Jenn and I have been called to minister to TCKs. We have such a passion for reaching the next generation for Christ that our family mission statement and the missionaries we personally support financially have to do with reaching the upcoming generation for Christ. We also have extensive experience mentoring and discipling youth through campus ministries, Bible camps, and youth groups.

I Love Curriculum Design!

The delays Jenn and I faced in going to Hungary have allowed me to gain valuable experience as a teacher at a local community college. My confidence as a teacher has increased, working with a variety of students. My skill as a teacher has also increased teaching science-based content and developing hands-on activities that social-studies teachers typically do not have the opportunity to teach. Lastly, redeveloping the curriculum for three courses, has shown me I love curriculum development. I also discovered I am good at it, having been evaluated by the National Science Foundation!

A Point of Urgency

Jenn and I have reached a point of urgency! My experience at the college has uniquely prepared me to serve at ICSB this fall. The school will be reviewing their entire K-12 social-studies curriculum, and I love doing this work! I am good at this work. I need to be there in the fall to help the school complete this work.

For Such a Time as This!

Jenn and I have intensified our praying about Hungary over the past several months. The more we pray, the more certain we become that the time is now. We are confident we need to make it to Hungary this summer so we are there in time for the K-12 social-studies curriculum review.

A Call to Action

The only thing preventing us from going to Hungary this summer  is money. We are currently just shy of 70% funded. We know God has called some of you to partner in ministry to TCKs. Please prayerfully consider financially partnering with us in this important work. The time to act is now. We cannot move forward without you!