March Update

Hello Friends,

 

I hope you are all doing very well and each of you are experiencing much grace in your lives.

 

I am excited to let you all know, we are back here in Pine Ridge. It is so good and refreshing to be back here. We didn't skip a beat getting here. Amanda, the kids, and I left Feb 23rd, we stayed in Nashville one night and moved onto Memphis and stayed until Thursday morning. We drove around 12 hrs Thursday and came the rest of the way on Friday and boy were we all glad to be here. Jacob and Leah did wonderful in the car and throughout our stays in different places, we have been so blessed with great children. Along those lines I would like to let all of you know that Amanda is carrying our 3rd child of which we are so very thankful and excited for. She is due Oct 6th and we are already thinking of some native names. We have been referred to as gypsies in recent times, I don't deny that because it sure has felt like we are.

It was great to be at church here yesterday, we have missed the people so much and there was great joy to see the small group of believers that are here. we had a good service, Mike was preaching on constantly stumbling over the gospel and afterwards a man who was from Oklahoma, who was here for a funeral came forward and received Christ.

There were 7 funerals going on in our area alone yesterday. One of them was held at our church, it was the sister of 2 ladies in our church. It is so heart breaking and sad to watch a funeral here, there is so much pain and hurt in their lives and then death just adds to it when you have no hope of eternity. All of their belief is in what they can accomplish in themselves, and if any of you have been around at all you will know that people will always let you down, we will always let ourselves down apart from Christ Jesus. We can never be good enough to merit righteousness before a holy God. Jesus is our righteousness.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. We continue to ask you for your prayers, that we would experience much grace in our family and ministry and that we would continue to grow our support to be here. We are here completely on faith that this is where God wants us to be and leaning on Him to take care of us as we should do anyways. I am hopefully going to get a part time job at the school as a teacher, pray that my interviews and such will go well.

One thing we would like to start doing is a quarterly newsletter that we would actually mail out, some people have asked us about this and we would like to put pictures in there so that you can have a more visual aid of what is going on. I will still include it to all of you that are on our email contacts but if you would like to receive a newsletter in the mail every 3 months please send me your physical address as I plan to work on this in the next few weeks.

I am so very blessed by so many of you. many of you have been a rock to lean on for Amanda and I and we are so very grateful. God is so good, He fills my heart with joy and peace. Our prayer is that the Love of God and His compassion will spill over into the lives of the people we meet along our journey through life. What great examples many of you have been of just that.

Learning to serve the Lord in all we do,

Matt, Amanda, Jacob, Leah and Peanut