Update from Mexico!

Hola Amigos!

Well, it's been week since our last post and SO much has happened..... As you saw from our previous post, the schedule around here is crazy but it keeps us out of trouble! :)

We had to say goodbye last Saturday to our dear friends that met us down here for the first week. It was sad seeing them off but at the same time it made the mission field seem a bit more realistic. There are so many people all over the world who do not have the pleasure of seeing friends and family every day. It should be a reminder to keep them in our prayers!

I believe in our last post that Nathan had been sick but he is doing much better. Thank you for your prayers. The rest of us have been fighting off colds but our "larger" bodies seem to handle sickness better than his. Please continue to keep us in your prayers.

Speaking of "larger" bodies...we've all put on a few pounds. The food here is Mexican, of course. So, there's lots of tacos, burritos, rice, beans, etc. I met a woman who is the wife of one of the Bible school staff and she had me over to her house twice this week at 6:30am to teach me how to make homemade tortillas. Oh my! Paper thin and delicioso! I believe, at last count, our family has consumed 4 dozen. Like I said, "larger"!

Speaking of food, a huge need around here is for "fresh"~ salad a few times a week is the only thing fresh and so when you get it, it's an obvious contrast to all the carbs. Occasionally they receive donations of vegetables and it's wonderful when they do. The last big donation from nearby was a load of zucchini. It was wonderful! We had zucchini soup, zucchini casserole and zucchini salad. The big shocker was when they served zucchini casserole (zucchini and onions) with refried beans. Who knew it would be so delicious all wrapped up together in a fresh tortilla? Oh, goodness....I just realized that I haven't had breakfast....that must be why all the talk of food. Sorry.

Have we mentioned how much sand is here? Not just on the ground but in the air? Some days the sand is blowing around so hard you can hardly see the mountains which are only a couple of miles away. They call them brownouts! We've had sand in our nose, eyes, ears, teeth, between our toes, caked in our eyebrows and nicely spread all over the entire surface of our exposed skin. It's really wonderful to be able to save on exfoliants. Just go outside and then rub your face! :) You know it's bad when your boys start saying, "Oh, I can't wait to be clean" and "Doesn't it feel so good to be clean?". Remember, these are boys! Usually we have to fight to get them in the shower. Now they beg for one! We've come to appreciate water in a whole new way!
Now to the other stuff....we were received our "job" assignments this week and we're all excited about what we'll be doing when we're not in the community loving on people.

Kate is working in the Day Care that is on site for the children of migrant workers in the area. It's a ministry of the mission to people who leave their children every day at home alone all day while they go work in the fields for a few dollars. The bus leaves early in the morning and goes around to all of their "houses", picks them up, brings them back here, they are undressed, given a bath while their clothes are being washed, dressed in little clean uniforms, fed breakfast, taught basic things (alphabet, numbers, colors, beginners reading and math), fed lunch, playtime, more schooling, put back into their clothes from home that have been cleaned and then brought home at the end of the day. It's a beautiful program and such a blessing to the community. Kate works there and does whatever they need her to do. She's with the children sometimes, sometimes she's washing dishes, sometimes she's sweeping the floor and straightening up the rooms...however she can serve is what she's there for. She came home one day and talked about how hard the work is in just taking care of children all day! I laughed!

Anna is working in the Cuna (nursery) and is in heaven! This is actually one of the houses that the orphans live in except it's for all those who aren't potty trained. Most of them are 2 and younger. The one little girl that was 3, who's name is Diana, has stolen Anna's heart. She fell in love with her week 1, and just this week Diana was moved to another casa because her time at the Cuna was up! Anna cried. She had really taken to this little girl who's mother died just a few months ago, giving birth to her little brother. The situation is so sad and it's amazing to watch how these children have to transition from their lives before to the orphanage. While you know this is so much better for them physically, the sadness in the eyes of the those who arrive just breaks your heart. They would rather be with Mommy than in a soft bed with guaranteed meals 3 times a day. Home really is a powerful place.

Stephen and Nathan are sticking by their Daddy's side. It's actually a great spiritual lesson. Stephen will say every day, "What's my job today Dad?" Steve answers the same way every day "Stay by my side son, whatever I do, you do". It often reminds me of when Jesus said, "I only do what the Father is doing". So whatever Steve's work assignment is the boys are right there doing the work with him. For little boys who like to play hard they sure are working hard too. It's really beautiful to see. Stephen can fill a wheelbarrow full of sand and lava rock just as good as anyone else. "Thank you Lord for the opportunity to teach our children how to work hard to meet another's need. "

My job is in the upholstery shop. Connie, if you're reading this, I'm laughing with you! :) Actually, my job isn't just to work in the upholstery shop, my job is to run the upholstery shop! I know it doesn't seem very spiritual but a lot of Kingdom work isn't. When Jesus fed people it wasn't very spiritual but it always gave them a deeper look into who He was. Upholstery isn't very deep but when you think about what life in Christ is like, upholstering can be spiritual....when we come to Him we need a complete overhaul. He covers us in His blood and just like that...a new creation! When something in our heart rips, we bring it to Him and He repairs it.

So, when you look at it, I guess it's an important job....especially here in Mexico when you can't afford to go out and buy a new pillow or cushion or chair...you just have to cover it! My first job is to cover an oversized chair. It's amazing how fast you learn how to swim when you're thrown in the water! My only instructions were, "take it apart but pay close attention how you take it apart because that's how you'll put it back together and use the old fabric that you take off is your pattern for your new fabric." So, that's what I'm doing!

Steve has landed a construction job for part of the time here and the rest of it is spent at Rancho de Christo (RdC). He is going to blog about this in another blog but RdC is a powerful place. Just to give you a taste of it, the first time we went there he cried the entire time. His sunglasses had never been so needed!

This week Steve was asked to preach in church so today he ministered in the English speaking service. It's a small congregation as the bulk of the people here are Hispanic but he was happy to do it.

We have been here long enough to feel like we are a part of the FFHM family and it will be hard to say goodbye. We are enjoying every moment here and already looking forward to the next trip!

This post was a more of "what we're doing post"....there are posts about what God is doing here and in us that are forthcoming....pray we get a few minutes in the midst of our days to send the good news home! We'll update again soon and post pictures next time! God bless you all and thank you again for your prayers!

NOTICE!

Dear Friends and Family,

We finally were able to post on our blog but we are UNABLE to view what we have posted so please forgive us if there are any weird configurations or errors....

We've done our best now God's got the rest! :)

Also, if you want to reach us you may do so by commenting on the blog page or emailing us at rosenfamily6@yahoo.com

Check back soon for another post!

We're Here!

Greetings! This post was written days ago but our internet service is sketchy and we weren't able to post....here it is and another post will be coming soon (hopefully).

Hola Amigos!

Well, we made it to Mexico and hit the ground running! Our trip down was spectacular as we enjoyed every mile of God’s creation between Colorado and here.

Sunday morning the 22^nd, we met up with friends and the rest of the team that would be traveling down to Vicente Guerrero. The lead driver was a Godsend as this was his 15^th time to visit FFHM. The only problem we had driving in Mexico was keeping up with Bob!

It was wonderful watching the children’s faces as we drove further and further into the Baja. The scenery was beautiful but the reality of how poor the people here are was sobering. Our encounter with extreme poverty began minutes after crossing the border.

Finally, we arrived Sunday evening around 5:15pm and the first stop was Smoky’s, the taco stand. Oh my! That’s all any of us can say about it….it is by far the best taco any of us have ever had, bar none! Sunday evening service started at 6pm so we quickly licked our paper plates and headed down the long dirt road which would lead us to FFHM. Finally, we had arrived!

The church is like a massive pole barn with tile floor and about 1,000 members. We were given headsets before the service began in order to listen to the translation. It was wonderful worshipping with our Mexican brothers and sisters in Christ!

After service we checked in, had orientation and then made our way to our rooms where we promptly passed out! By the way, the rooms for visitors are dormitory style unless you are here longer than a couple of weeks and then you move to another location on the property. Our home for the next month will be Casa Blanca! It’s a two bedroom house that’s just a little bit bigger than the cabin we lived in. God was preparing us back then for the mission field!

Since arriving, we’ve had a tour of the 72 acres which includes an orphanage, a church, a bible school, a soup kitchen, a 2,800 macadamia nut orchard, a “nut house” where the nuts are packaged to sell, an auto shop, a printing shop, a fire/ambulance department, an upholstery shop, a clinic with a delivery/operating room, a dentist office, a bike shop where they take bike parts and make them into wheel chairs and then distribute freely to handicapped children/adults, a laundry mat, a day care for the community and a beautiful prayer garden laden with fruit trees.

The amazing thing about this place is that 100% of everything they do here at the mission is FREE to anyone in the community. The mission began with one woman having a vision of an orphanage and a bible school in this region of the Baja and then everything else was birthed from visitors coming here and saying “You know, it would be great if you had this…”. Then the founder, Charla Pereau, would say, “Then you should pray about coming here and starting up that ministry”. Today, 43 years later, Foundation For His Ministry is a tremendous blessing to a large portion of the Baja Peninsula.

A typical week day at FFHM looks like this:

Prayer

7:00 am Breakfast in the 300 seat cafeteria begins. You have 15 min. to eat.

7:15 am Clean up for those scheduled/free time for the rest

8:00am Sala begins (mission devotions). Everyone must attend.

9:00am Work duties begin. Everyone has a job everyday.

11:00am Half hour break at the snack shack

1:00pm Lunch break. You get 30 minutes for lunch!

1:30pm Clean up for those scheduled/free time for the rest

2:00pm Continue working/community child evangelism outreach for those scheduled

4:30pm Work day ends/clean up for dinner

5:00pm Dinner with 30 min. to eat

6:00pm Evangelism in the surrounding communities each night except for Wed. night church service

10:00pm Curfew

11:00pm Lights out

Fridays are half days to allow for a trip to town for visitors.

Weekends are free but Sunday am/pm services are mandatory.

After going through orientation on Sunday night;

Monday work was the whole family weeding the Lasagna Garden. It consists of 12 beds that are approximately 3x12 with the weeds 3 ft. high. Steve was very thankful for his gardening job last summer where he learned some weed removal tricks! We all pitched in and Tricks and all, it’s still backbreaking work!

Tuesday, Steve and the boys continued working in the garden. Anna worked in the soup kitchen and was deeply moved by the people in the community who came for natural food and received spiritual food as well. Kate and I worked in the Nut House making strawberry jam. Driscolls Strawberry plant which is 5 miles down the road donated tons of strawberries. In the evening, Steve took the three older children to the evangelism outreach and I stayed behind with Nathan (he’s sick). The outreach went into a migrant worker camp where the Oaxacan people live in cardboard houses and have no running water or electricity. They were there for 3 ½ hours just loving on the people, sharing a video in Spanish and then ministering to whomever. It really impacted Anna. She can’t stop talking about it. She wants to come here for her birthday next year and stay for a month and minister to the migrant workers.

Wednesday, Steve and the boys finished the Lasagna garden before lunch. Kate watched Nathan at home. Anna and I worked at the Nut House making more jam. In the afternoon, Steve took all of the children on the child evangelism outreach and I finished making strawberry jam.

Last nights church service was wonderful. The entire service was given to the bible college students and the theme was world missions. It was so beautiful. The message was given by a man who had grown up here at the orphanage. At the age of eleven, he gave his life to the Lord and felt the call to go to the world to preach the gospel. For eleven years he served with YWAM and ended up going to 10 different nations sharing the love of God. It was a very special evening.

We are very thankful to be here and have all adjusted to this new way of living. From the moment you wake up until you go to sleep you are serving someone. We learned yesterday that the only people around here that are paid for work are the Mexicans. The Americans or Canadians that work here are completely volunteer. When you find out how long most of these people have been here, that’s amazing!

Thank you all for your love and support. We would love to say that we miss you but to be honest, we haven’t had the time! We do think about how wonderful it would be if you all could be here with us enjoying the beautiful body of Christ from the Baja!

We wanted our first post to be an overview so we will follow up on another blog post with thoughts on ministry opportunities we’ve already had! Blessings to you all!

In Christ,

Steve and Kara Rosen

"The will of God is not something you add to your life. It's a course you choose." Elisabeth Elliot

The next month of blogs is going to chronicle for you our experiences on our first mission trip as a family. However, we're not there yet...we're in California waiting for the rest of our group to arrive so that we can cross over into Mexico together. So, before the "mission" actually begins, we want to share with you the journey up until this point.....

It's a very interesting thing to follow the Lord. Most of the time it makes no sense whatsoever....at least to the natural mind. 1 Cor. 1:27 "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty".

Last year we began to sense that we needed to go on a family missions trip. So, the Lord began to stir our hearts where we were and we began going downtown Fort Collins, ministering to the poor. We've gone to Planned Parenthood to pray peacefully against the murder of the unborn. We've brought food to the hungry on the side of the freeway but the urge to go as a family somewhere never left. It seemed that the little things we were doing continued to miss the point. It's hard to get God's perspective on the poor and hungry when after you feed them you go out to a restaurant for dinner. So, the pull to immerse ourselves in an environment that would forever change us grew. We began to consider several places like Cambodia, Nairobi and Haiti. We had contacts in all of these places but none seemed to be the right place. Then in January, there was one particular day when praying about a missions trip and having God's heart when out of the blue Mexico came to mind. So we began to pray about it and it seemed as if this was the place. Why Mexico? We don't know but God does. Mexico has never been on our grid but it seems that it's on God's.

We had a friend who had been to a mission on the Baja Peninsula so we contacted her and found out more information about this place. It was Foundation For His Ministry (ffhm.org). We seemed to know this was the place we were supposed to go to. It wasn't too long before we realized that going for a week wasn't sufficient for us. We didn't want to just go for a few days, do some good, and then come back to our suburban life. We needed to live with these people. We needed to love them like God does. We needed to experience poverty, hunger and despair. We needed to look into the eyes of who we are spiritually apart from Jesus. So, the decision was made to stay for a month. Actually, that's what we felt God say to our hearts after we prayed about how long we should go for.

So, the adventure began. We submitted applications and waited. We waited for nearly 6 weeks for an answer. Finally, it came. We were going to Mexico! Then the battle began. One at a time, well meaning friends and family began to inform us of Mexico's current "climate"...you know, the activities around the drug lords.....Well, we would fend off the little attacks from Fear one at a time until the onslaught began to wear us down. Did we really hear from God? Is it horrible for us to bring our children to this place? What were we thinking? Couldn't someone else go and do the job and we could stay home and be safe? We didn't have to wait to go to Mexico to be in the middle of a war...it had begun in our own minds. Night after night the tormenting thoughts would come and day after day we would push them aside. Finally the days and nights ran together until God.....

She might be in her early twenties, maybe late teens, but regardless, she's a tall, elegant daughter of the King. She came to our garage sale and we began to talk. I had known her for a few months but today we went from being acquaintances to friends....the kind of friend that loves you with the Truth. She came just at the right time. The battle was raging in my mind although I continued selling items that I had owned for years for a quarter. We began to talk and eventually my struggles came to the surface. After listening for a while, she looked at me with an interesting expression and then spoke..."You know, that doesn't sound like God. I mean, it doesn't seem like God would be trying to warn you from going to Mexico in the form of fear. After all, the Word says He has not given us a spirit of fear". WHAT? My heart was taken back. Somewhere in all of this we had lost sight of the Word. The Word that sets you free. The Word that cleanses you. The Word that gives you Peace. How could we have forgotten the Word? Immediately the scriptures began to pour in...."Perfect love casts out all fear", "There is no fear in love", "Fear hath torment", "The Lord is my helper, I will not fear what man shall do unto me"....and on and on and on. What a washing! What a clearing! Instantly the war was over. God had won! The victory was His and His alone. All of our reasoning had left us empty but God's Word had filled our hearts with Peace. We were officially back in the game.

Then the heart of God appeared. "For God so loved the world that He gave...". This isn't about us. It never was. It's about others. It's about the poor, the little children, widows and migrant workers. It's about the weak and lonely. It's about the lost that are groping in darkness. We are not our own. Our children are not our own. We are His for Him to spend us as He chooses. What a comfort to know that we belong to the Lord and that nothing shall come near us except that God chooses it. Such freedom!

The next hurdle was coming up with the finances. As of 2 weeks before our trip was to take place, we didn't have a single dime towards it. With us being gone as long as we have planned, we needed quite a bit more than just the amount for the trip. For all 6 of us to go and be gone for 6 weeks, we needed about $9,500. We felt the Lord asked us not to send out letters for money but to ask for prayer instead. So, we trusted him and waited. Several days later it began! First, we received a phone call from a man we met once 3 months ago. He informed us that God had given him a dream and in that dream he was told that he was supposed to sow financial seed into our family! The first money for our trip began to come in...that was the first testimony. Then music work from everywhere began to pour in. All of it needing to be done in less than 2 weeks! There were so many miraculous moments! Then there were calls and letters and $100 bills falling from the visor of our car! By the time we left Colorado, we were only about $400 shy of our total amount and, for some reason (hmmm), we feel that it will come in while we are gone! God has been so faithful to make it clear to us that we are to go to Mexico. He has provided in miraculous ways!

So, we are now sitting in California counting down the hours until our departure. It seems that we're at 48.... Errands to run, meetings to be had, final touches being added and then we're off! Sunday, the 22nd, around noon (Pacific time) we will begin our journey across the border.

So back to the beginning, our family is headed into what the world says right now is "foolish" but we know that life awaits us there. Mexico has been given to us and God has made the way. From the first day Mexico came to our hearts, we've had a green light. It seemed at every turn the enemy of our souls was there to attack us but God saw us through every question, doubt and fear. It's amazing how the Word of God puts everything in perspective.

What is it that God is asking you to do? What is the cost? Have you counted it? Is He worth it? Are those you are being asked to be spent for worth it? He says they are. What do you say?