I would not say that it is a blessing to be here during the time of grandpa's death but realizing that we would normally be trying to figure out if any of us should fly home. If any then how many or can we afford to pay for plane tickets for everyone? It would be a challenge that normally we would be facing being on the mission field. This is just one of the aspects of the life we live being so far from home. Yes it only takes us four and half hours to fly to Chicago but the reality is that we live in a different country separated from our families. We don't get to just go out to eat on Sunday afternoons or get visit for a few hours before we have to put the kids to sleep. We have appreciated the time that God has given us during this time. We are fortunate to be home during this time. Both my in-laws are dealing with the lose of a parent. We may not be able to comfort them with what we say but we are here with them during this time which is one of the most important things. It is the Lord who orchestrates our steps. We are thankful we are here.
Days have seemed to run together here. It is now Tuesday. I don't know what happened to the last few days? From the last post I wanted to give an update about Jessie's grandpa. He passed away on Thursday morning. Each day, Jessie would go to the nursing home where he was being cared for. Each day, everyone knew it was coming. With all of Jessie's aunts and uncles there, Jessie saw that Grandpa breathing had changed. She then informed her dad who had been chatting with the family. Then Jessie let the other family know it was time as they had not been paying attention to what was transpiring. He was breathing and then he just stopped. It was finally over. Since November he had been in a nursing home slowly getting worse. My father-in-law had said he had been losing his dad for a long time with Alzheimer yet even in those months leading to his death, Mike was able to love on his dad like he had never done in his whole life time. He was able to hug and kiss him and tell him how much he loved him. Grandpa would always respond with "I love you too".
I would not say that it is a blessing to be here during the time of grandpa's death but realizing that we would normally be trying to figure out if any of us should fly home. If any then how many or can we afford to pay for plane tickets for everyone? It would be a challenge that normally we would be facing being on the mission field. This is just one of the aspects of the life we live being so far from home. Yes it only takes us four and half hours to fly to Chicago but the reality is that we live in a different country separated from our families. We don't get to just go out to eat on Sunday afternoons or get visit for a few hours before we have to put the kids to sleep. We have appreciated the time that God has given us during this time. We are fortunate to be home during this time. Both my in-laws are dealing with the lose of a parent. We may not be able to comfort them with what we say but we are here with them during this time which is one of the most important things. It is the Lord who orchestrates our steps. We are thankful we are here.
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So we were debating whether or not we should go to a cabin in central Minnesota for a few days starting on Sunday after church. We had been discussing it over the course Thursday through Saturday and finally came to the decision to not go to the cabin. We decided to go back to Illinois a few days earlier than we had planned. We both felt it was the right decision for us as a family to travel the 7 hours back to Illinois and have a few days of nothing planned before we head to a homeschooling conference all day Friday and Saturday. After church on Sunday we started packing up our stuff. In the evening we received a phone call from Jessie's mom. We have known that Jessie's grandpa (her dad's dad) is starting to go down hill in the past few months. He was now in a nursing home having my father-in-law visit him to help feed him every other day. Well in the last week he was having difficulty swallowing. On Sunday, they decided to stop giving him food. Even now as I write, Jessie is with her parents at the nursing home with the end in sight.
Before we left for Minnesota in March, we did visit it him. He was still up in his wheel chair smiling at times but his speech was incomprehensible. It was good for him to see the kids as well as the kids see him. So even if we had decided to go to a cabin for a few days, Sunday evening we would have been driving back and packing up to head back to Illinois to be with the family. I feel it was the Lord leading us to this decision of going home earlier than we had planned. Pray with us that God would use us to be an encouragement during this time of difficulty with losing a family member. This will also be the first death and funeral that our kids have experienced. As some of you may have seen already on facebook, on Saturday we started a go-fund-me page to raise funds for a new used car. So if you click on this link below you can donate or for tax deductible giving can be either sent to our mission by check or via Paypal. The go-fund-me page has more info if and an explanation to why we are raising funds for a new car. If you have any questions feel free to email us anytime or call me. I have a cell phone number for while we are stateside 612-300-8063
www.gofundme.com/car-funds-for-the-clark-family Our mission's website to use Paypal www.tecatemission.com/?page_id=2115 We are stateside It has been a while since I last posted here. We are doing well. I have an office at the church in Minnesota so I believe I will have more time to update.
What can I say about the last 8 weeks being stateside? We have been busy. It is so different than normal years when we come home. Usually we are home for less than 6 weeks, so everything is go, go, go. No we are here and we trying to be more diligent about slowing things down and not trying to push to do so much. We are at the beginning of our sabbatical so it takes time to figure out how to live outside the routine of normal life (if there is such a thing). Prayer request: I, Andy am in a season of headaches. I may have described them here before but just in case, I get cluster headaches. Almost every night an hour or so after falling asleep, I wake up with tension starting from top part of my right shoulder, up through my neck, up over the top of my head, then ending underneath my right eye. It will spike with pain and then slowly start to dissipate. Some nights are worse than others where it will slowly go away while other nights it will go away more quickly and I am able to fall back asleep sooner. Some nights it might take over an hour from when I wake up to when I can finally get back to sleep. I use a rice bag to heat up the tension but sometimes nothing helps. The reason this is called cluster headaches that this can happen up to several weeks to two or three months basically every night. This effects how much sleep I am getting. Please pray for me. Thanks Every year we deal with the same thing, do we celebrate Thanksgiving and if we do when? If you stay off of social media or the internet for that matter, you wouldn't even know it was Thanksgiving. Life is normal here. There is no one to ask you what are you going to be doing for Thanksgiving. No one asks you if you are heading to a different state to visit with family. No one to explain how on Thanksgiving you visit one side of the family and the following month during Christmas you visit the other depending on where they live. This is how we would handle the holidays when we lived in Minnesota. That was 9 years ago. Now we are the only Americans living in Autlan with the exception of a single lady who works with the baptist church in town. Over the years we would have a meal together with other missionary families. Now, if we don't put the time into it, it is a holiday that just passes by. Even now as I sit here in my office there are so many of you preparing for the holiday feast. We do plan to celebrate on Saturday when it is more convenient, especially when we have our weekly bible study as well as possible meeting with a few people today.
During our discussion about whether we should celebrate with a traditional Thanksgiving meal, one thing that effects our decision is the fact that our kids don't eat the food very well. Our kids look American but their taste buds are very much Mexican. One of our favorite meals is beans and chorizo (Mexican sausage) and tortillas. All of them will scarf it down in no time often asking for seconds. Last year at Thanksgiving, we gave each kid a plate of turkey, potatoes and gravy, yams, green beans, stuffing, and even cranberry's (something you rarely find). Anna is the only one who finished her plate while the others asked "do we have to eat this?" We would smile and tell them "This is what everyone else on this day are eating. It's good for you to try things that you normally wouldn't eat." Just to give you another idea of what it is like in our home, this morning Jessie mentioned that with the temperature starting to get cooler, it might be a good time for chilly and that is when Levi than yelled "yeah chilly dogs, yum!!" Then we explained to him the chilly is like a bean soup that you eat. "OH. So we can't have chilly dogs then?" What else do we expect a six-year-old missionary kid to think? This is life in a different country. I hope you have a good day celebrating with family and friends remembering all the things we are grateful to have. My prayers is that God would reveal to you His blessings and provision in ways that you normally wouldn't think of. Be blessed on this day of Thanksgiving! As a church we celebrate communion or translated Santa Cena meaning holy supper once a month. Each time, we celebrate, I briefly explain what communion means to us as believers and why we do it. I try to explain it similarly each month but give different reasons so that I am saying the same thing every month. As a pastor, you can explain something in so many ways but never know for sure if the congregation comprehends what you are trying to express.
The women of the church are going through a study call Abundant Life on the basics of Christian faith. They do a chapter every week on various topics like baptism, obedience and why we read our bibles. This week they got to the chapter about communion. Jessie thought this would be pretty simple topic to discuss because we read from various passages like 1 Cor 11. Boy was she wrong. The women began to dive deeper into the topic and asked a lot of questions about it. When you grow up listening to a priest who says the wafer and juice actually transforms into the real body and blood of Jesus, speaking biblically what we as Christians believe about communion and what the bible actually says about it was clearly needed. All around us people believe the wafer is actually physical body. This is such a foreign idea to me. But if you consider that your religion is not based on your own study but on what a priest tells you, why would even question what this man who speaks for God say. He speaks on God's behalf so he would not be lying? I have said repeatedly "Don't just take my word for it. Test what I say. I can make mistakes. The bible is the final authority. Study it for yourself. Don't just believe something because someone tells you." So I ask you, why do you believe what you believe? Is it because you have heard good preaching? Have you studied on your own, what the bible says or do you just take it from because some teacher said. I am dealing with this very thing in studying Romans 8:28-39. We are studying it as a church during our Thursday night bible study. We started Romans a year ago in September. We have gotten to Romans 8 and have slowed way down taking one or two verses per study. The truth that is packed into the chapter take years to study. I feel as though I am just scratching the surface in our bible studies. But what I want is for the people who come to see we are not making anything up but searching the scriptures to see how they connect with other parts of the bible. My desire is to see milk drinkers become self-feeding meat eaters. I am off to study more on Romans. Have a great day. I believe there are times in life, when you feel the weight of what God calls you to do. As many pastor's deal with this issue, it continues to be a never ending issue in the lives of so many you work with. Ask just one question: Who is your father and what is his relationship with you? This brings so many different answers. It has been clear for many years in the time we have been here in Mexico, this one of the most difficult things we deal with. Young people who have never had a dad. There are good times of joy and laughter, but with it comes the pain and frustration of correction which not always easy to do. As I say this, I will be leaving shortly to deal with this very issue. I think the biggest problem with having no father figure in your life, is the lack of correction and rules. I am not saying that rules are everything but when you have lived your hold childhood with no one telling you it is wrong to be lazy all the time or coming home anytime of the night, there comes a time where this will have to be addressed. The most difficult thing is how this young person perceives this correction as an unloving action. In their mind frame, to love them means leave them alone to do whatever it is they want to do. "What would cause someone to restrict me or cause me to feel uncomfortable with doing something that is supposedly wrong?"
I ask you does it feel good to receive correction? It says in Hebrews 12:11 (ESV) For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. At the moment of correction, if it is the first time does it still produce the same thing? I would say that there needs to be a clear definition of what true love is before the correction is implemented. I share this with you, to pray for wisdom, godly wisdom in dealing with someone has not been corrected for a very long time. It makes me ponder of the times in the gospels where Jesus confronted the pharisees on how they were living calling them white washed tombs. What would have been like for one of those men to repent and say, "I am tomb full of dead bones trying to convince everyone around me that I have it altogether." No discipline seems pleasant in the moment but painful later yielding fruit of righteousness. For a men's bible study yesterday I was preparing for it looking over the text in 1 Timothy 2:4-5 which says:
(God) who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, These are pretty straight forward verses. God doesn't want anyone to reject the truth of who Jesus is and what he came to do for us for the human race. I started to check on google for a few references to see what I could find. I came across a Catholic website http://fsspx.org/en/priest-mediator I was curious to see what they had to say about these verses. I was not surprised by what they said about the priest. Here are two paragraphs from what they wrote. Catholic priesthoodWhat need is there then, one may ask, of merely human priests, after Our Lord’s perfect sacrifice? Well, the fact is that nothing has changed of the three points made above: man is still social, still a creature, and still sinful. Thus, man still needs leaders of religious ceremonies to offer homage and reparation to God on his behalf. There will never be a time here below when men will not have to offer sacrifice to God. Our Lord Jesus Christ wanted to provide men with the means of re-presenting His own most perfect sacrifice to God, so that its fruits could be applied until the end of time. As such, He gave to certain men the power to act in His name and, by doing so, repeat His perfect mediation with the Father on our behalf. Men receive this power through the sacrament of Holy Orders, and such men are rightly called “other Christs.” This is the nature of the Catholic priesthood: to act in the person of Christ by offering His own sacrifice to God for the payment of sin, as well as the offering of adoration, thanksgiving, and petition. I was a little taken back by the sentence that says to offer homage and reparation to God on his behalf. It would seem this is back to the old covenant that God had with Jews. They could not enter the holy place or the holiest of holies. They needed someone to offer a sacrifice for their sins. Does it not say that when Jesus breathed his last breath on earth that the veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom? This is one of the many truths we bring to light in a culture that believes that there are men who are "closer" to God and because of this God will listen to these men better. It is true that in James 15:6 (NIV) The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. or (ESV) The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. It is biblical to pray for others in various different ways, but thinking that God listens to men who are more holy or closer to God is an incorrect way of thinking. It says just before this in James, "Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed." This does not mean that we need a human mediator to "offer sacrifice to God". Jesus came in the flesh, lived a sinless life on earth, died on a cross, rose again, ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of the Father. Romans 8:34 (ESV) Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Hebrews 10:19-25 (ESV) Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. I do apologize if I sound like I am preaching. What I want is that God would be glorified in bringing us closer to Himself through the truth of His word. I do not want people thinking that because I am a pastor that I am closer to God or my prayers are better in some way. You can see that this is a battle in a culture where everyone believes the priest speaks for God, Even when they come to faith in Jesus, there are lasting effects of their religious roots. I don't know what happened to the past few months? The last post was from July. Wow time has gotten away from me. I thought to myself today. I better get back on here and do an update, not fully realizing how long had it been. Life has been really busy.
Aletta has recovered well from getting a tonsillectomy at the beginning of the month. It had been a concern over the past two years. We had considered her surgery last year but after talking with the doctor, she suggested we wait and see if the swelling would go down with allergy medicine. It didn't help at all. Her tonsils were so inflamed at times they would be touching. The concern with this is that there might be a difficulty to breath when she has is sick. So we paid for her surgery over $1000 US dollars which the Lord provided for us We are grateful to have this done with and look forward to how this will effect Aletta in the long run. Jessie has always had issues growing up with her tonsils doing the same thing. After a bout of strep throat lasting over a month and a few rounds of antibiotics, her tonsil never fully recovered and never get swollen like they did before. As I drove home from a morning devotion that I do on a weekly basis at Christian youth rehab center, I looked at my watch which read. 8:30 AM. When I had left the house it was still dark out at 6:45 AM. I thought to myself, I definitely have gotten used to living here in small town Mexico. As I drove, very few stores were open. The only one that I saw that was open was the tortillaria. (the place where they make fresh tortillas). Other then that, nothing was open. If you ponder for a moment about why, what comes to your mind? Every other store opens at 9 AM. Let me try to shed some light as to why. For one, the work schedule for an average person is, 9 AM-2 PM with breakfast at 10 AM which is maybe 30 minutes give or take. Then you go home to eat from 2 PM- 4PM. Giving you plenty of time to get home, eat and even take a short nap, which is easy to do after your belly is full and it is the hottest part of the day. Then back to work from 4PM-8PM. So this is your average work schedule from Monday through Friday and half a day until 2 PM on Saturday. Another reason is that if you have any young kids who go to kindergarten, ages 3-6 you drop them off at 9 AM. Elementary kids get started early some at 7 AM and others at 8 AM. High school is divided into two mornings and afternoons, with the mornings starting at 7 AM and in the afternoon at 3 PM. All this to say, that you get use to this way of life after almost 9 years. You get used to getting all your errands done with before 2 PM. Actually you appreciate it when it gets so blazing hot in the sun, all you want to do is relax and sit in front of a fan to cool off. Our weekly bible study at church, we have to start at 8 PM because of these hours. We have tried to start earlier at times with no such luck. Everyone is busy and occupied until then. So you just roll with it. That means some late nights. The bus system stops running buses at 8:30, so that leaves people walking home in the dark, which we don't like people doing. So I often give people a ride home, finally getting to bed at 11:30 at night. It is just the way it is. As I finish this post at 2:40 PM, I have a thermometer that sits on my desk that reads 81 degrees. Who wants go out and work in this heat? Until next time, may you be encouraged to enjoy the blessings God has given you! I tell you, the way days seem to be running away so fast. Yesterday, I got a new radiator in our truck. As I was walking back to the house after dropping it off, I was pondering about the 4 of July. In years past we have been in the states celebrating with family and seeing fireworks. Yesterday our niece Gabby, asked what we were going to do to celebrate the fourth? She is visiting us for the month. We didn't even remember really until she asked. When you have no one to celebrate US holidays, then you tend to forget about them. It was a normal day in Mexico We ended up working on the back yard which if we don't attend to it, becomes a jungle during the rainy season. We decided to have a bon fire. We had hot dogs and SMORES!!!!!!!! This was a real treat for us. We can't get graham crackers here, plus the marshmallows have a different flavor. So we didn't do any fireworks but we did have fire!
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