November 2023 Newsletter

Greeting from Ethan a servant of the most high and a man captivated by the reality of Christ Jesus our LORD, to all those whom this may reach may the love and grace of our LORD be with you all and I pray you will be encouraged by these words.

We have finished ministry in Cambodia and are heading to Thailand on December first. The guys on the team I’m leading have grown so much. Growth can be a hard thing to see if you are constantly around that which is growing but this past week I’ve been able to take a different perspective and be able to see that growth. They are so loving to the local people, they have such deep hearts for the Gospel and making sure people come to believe it. The impact the LORD made through our hands this past month was truly beautiful. We helped build and almost complete a new class room at the ministry as well as be part of caring for the teachers who were in need of a well deserved break and care for our host who is extremely tired. Not to mention having the beautiful opportunity to care for 50+ children daily through playing, teaching and sharing the word of God! I’m eager to see how the LORD will continue to use us in Thailand working again with kids in a village alongside one of the women teams YADA. Israel means “To wrestle with God” and Yada means “a deep or close intimacy with the LORD” so my prayer for the next month is for our teams including myself to wrestle with the LORD for deeper, closer intimacy and greater dependence on Him and Him alone. 

Chuuk, Cambodia a place I didn’t expect to fall in love with, but did. The place itself is very ordinary, nothing too special about it on the surface. However, if you look a little deeper, a little closer you will find beautiful people. A month and a half of your life is very minimal, not much happens, you probably do similar things every day. That’s the beauty of it though, that even in a small amount of time in an ordinary place God moves, extraordinarily. We had the exact same routine basically every day, similar to most people in Chuuk. Get up, eat a breakfast of coconut waffles and dragon fruit, work for a few hours. Then in the middle of the day take an extended break before working a little longer. Then eat dinner of rice, chicken and onions followed by what is probably your second shower of the day because of the nearly one hundred degree heat with a friendly eighty five plus percent humidity. Then you’re off to bed again before you do it all again tomorrow. So in a routine that can be so copy-paste how is it that God can move so wonderfully? The answer lies within his faithfulness to use His children to reach His children. In Galatians 5 Paul speaks about the freedom we come to have in Christ through the Holy Spirit. He writes this to the Church in Galatia because the Pharisees and/or new believers were convincing people that you had to be physically circumcised to be a Christian. Now at its core that message they were spreading sounds like “to be loved and accepted you have to do x, y and z”. THAT IS NOT THE GOSPEL. Jesus stands there with his arm wide open to accept his children however they come to Him. He is the one who is faithful to work on their hearts through sanctification so we can be “holy as He is holy”. We are aiming to be perfected and He is faithful to do so. So, if Christ Jesus is the one who brings the growth, the increase, He is the one who truly reveals Himself to people then all He asks us to be is faithful. Faithful to be open, faithful to wake up and choose the Cross. As we chose to be faithful to Him who is ALWAYS faithful,He did His work through us.

 We witnessed the beautiful people of Chuuk begin to love spending time with us, and begin to recognize us as different. When we first got to the base it was as though we were foreigners coming into a place we were not wanted, the day we left it was as though we were family. What was incredibly hard was not being able to express in words what the Gospel is and why we were there. What was beautiful was that we had to express it through actions. Galatians 5:5 “But we who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive by faith the righteousness God has promised to us. 6 For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or being uncircumcised. What is important is faith expressing itself in love.” The last part of verse 6 is truly what we got to live out over the last month and a half. The day we left, one of the classes we taught was almost all reduced to tears, teachers reduced to tears, our host, tears. Not because we had great conversations, but because the LORD was faithful to use our open hearts to express his love through our faith and us expressing our faith in love. As I write this, preparing to leave Cambodia I too am reduced to tears in awe of the LORD’s faithfulness. 

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