In the last 10 days...

On Saturday morning (not this last one but the one before that), Vickie and I attended a seminar that an HCJB radio mission pastor was leading here near the school. We had our kids relaxing, studying, playing soccer with friends, etc. so we could focus on the meeting. About one hour into it, one of the school’s chaplain leaders came to find me. Yep- that is never a good sign.

We followed him out the iron door gate and headed toward the fence around the AAI school soccer field to see Kayla lying flat on the 1940’s vintage wood bleachers. Yet another thing that is never a good sign. The ice bag on the knee told the story. Knee injuries are tough to diagnose, and especially tough when they first happen and you don’t have x-ray vision. So, we chose the ice/rest/wait till Monday morning approach. After the taxi left to take her up the massive hillside street where we live, our attention turned back to the seminar. Vickie and I breathlessly hurried our way back in and tried to refocus. Of course the morning break began about the time we rejoined the group, so we thankfully had a cup of coffee to settle back in. It was then that I noticed I had missed a call on my tiny cell phone from an unknown number. Again, this is never a good sign. As I began writing, the phone rang again, and so I ducked outside to catch it. Our daughter Kelsey began with “Dad, we have a problem.”

Our son Karson and our two college daughters were slated to fly out to come to Quito, and they should have been leaving Birmingham that morning. We knew they had made it to the airport, and we were excited that by midnight we would see the three of them! The only problem now was that Karson’s passport was too close to expiration for him to fly. God gave great grace and miracles with friends in Birmingham, and with the government, and with the airlines for Karson to go that Monday to Atlanta to get a renewal. Delta allowed him to then be able to fly out that Monday afternoon to join us by around midnight.

So our family time together here (except for Kollin in Ukraine) began with a couple of glitches but then settled out quickly. What now? Well- it came to diagnosis time for Kayla and “the knee”. So this required an X-ray, then a doctor visit, then an MRI at 8:30 PM at night a couple of days later, then a report the next day… (all of this was in Spanish, all of this via taxi or walking, so keep this in mind as you casually think of your American doctor visits)

Now hold all those pictures in suspended animation while you change scenes. This scene involves our adopted son Kyle, age 19. He is here with us. It is no secret that kids from backgrounds of abuse, and neglect, and from birth parents that abused alcohol don’t always make the best decisions. He came to be with us between 12-13 yeas of age from an orphanage, and yes he came from a background like that. And, true to form, he has made several decisions lately that just don’t make sense. So, let’s just leave this poor judgment crisis running in the background for now while we tackle other issues.

So here we are on Monday, getting ready for some sports tryouts for the boys. The doctor in a routine physical exam for Kole and Kory shows me a funny heartbeat in Kory. This little discovery leads to an EKG, and then to a cardiologist visit today. This points to the need for an echocardiogram set for tomorrow, and then 24 hours of wearing a heart monitor. We’ll find out more later on this matter. Oh yes, and he failed the eye test on his physical too, so we scheduled the Ophthalmologist visit on the same day.

End result? He needs glasses. Should be interesting to strap some vision correction on this boy who climbs, jumps, grabs, throws, swings, runs, and flips on a moment-to-moment basis.

Now while these little events are going on, let’s circle back to Kayla’s “knee” and see how that is going. Off we go in a taxi with our films and MRI results to Metropolitano Hospital. Our very confident doctor takes a look. The verdict comes back for Kayla- it’s a blown ACL (I’ll spare you the medical jargon, but suffice to say that this is not good news). So now the dilemma is when to schedule surgery for her.

Okay- now you all know plenty of ways to pray: wisdom, grace, sustaining strength, and the opportunity to display Christ in all these difficulties.

Vickie and I obviously have been less than focused on normal work deadlines in the last few days, so we would seek grace for this as well.

Thank you for your help and prayers for us, we praise God for your faith!

The Gospel and Thanksgiving at AAI in Quito

 This Sunday afternoon, if you could be an electron on the Google Earth screen of your computer, and fly up from “Where-ever-you-are”, and drop down to our flat spot next to Juan Jose Villalengua Street and into our school conference room, you would find a small gathering of part of our school faculty. We’ll be gathered there for a brief time of prayer, sharing, thanksgiving, and encouragement in the word.

We won’t be focused on turkey and dressing, because we won’t be cooking any that day (although we will be later in the week Lord willing!)

 We will be there hearing from one another, praying for one another, and offering thanks to God for His work on our behalf in so many ways!

So if you are reading this now, I would ask, for the sake of the truth of the Gospel message, and for the sake of His glory to Ecuador and to every nation, that you might spend 5 minutes praying.

Pray for our time on Sunday both in house church, and in the faculty gathering.

Pray for R. and S. and B. and C., who are men that God has given to me to mentor in word, and prayer, and simply in “life on life” experience. Pray for a 5^th one that seeks to be led but whose work schedule seems to prevent it.

Pray that our English conversations/relationship multiplies into their Spanish conversations and relationships that make disciples!

Pray for M and B and their kids, a cross cultural family that is part of our house church, that God would use His word to have eternal impact through their lives. Pray for wisdom for us as we walk together in the gospel.

Pray for lost students from 23 countries at AAI to be open to the Gospel. There are Buddhist kids, atheist kids of missionaries, unbelieving kids whose parents are Roman Catholic in family tradition but who have no relationship with Christ, kids whose parents are living in other countries for economic reasons, and a myriad of other situations.

Pray for our AAI staff to be encouraged, and to be strengthened by His Spirit to obey His word, and to be the gospel in all ways.

Pray for Vickie and for me, for our marriage to display the glory of Christ, and especially for wisdom in Christ to lead our family, and to know how to love them well in the midst of mission, in the midst of multiple cultures, and with the unique challenge of 5 adopted plus 4 biological children scattered on 3 continents.

1 Thessalonians 5:14-18

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Things to think through on Friday afternoon

A few little things about life here, that you probably take for granted in Birmingham daily life... that you might smile about.


1) dishwashing machines -a rare thing here, and we have the dishpan hands to prove it.


2) Natural gas line direct to your house - we have 4 separate propane tanks... one tank for the stove, one for the dryer, and two for the beloved calephones (water heaters)...these tanks are about twice as large & heavy as a US propane tank, and yes they do run out at 5:30 AM- I have experienced it.


3) Starting a car and driving wherever you want. - You think the DMV is trouble there? Ha! Step one toward even getting a license here (legally) is a blood test, yes a blood test.


4) Lanes, driving in lanes... no such thing.


5) Seasoning packets for tacos, chili, etc., virtually non-existent.


6) You cannot bring your grocery basket through the cashier line, so you leave it and unload onto the conveyor belt, thereby leaving a mass of baskets in the way. I mean hundreds of them.


7) No dropping your bills in the mail for phone, electricity, etc. You go stand in line and pay a service company to pay your bill for you. You pray they don't ask you complicated questions while you are in line.


8) Everywhere has an armed guard. Everywhere. Get used to it. 


9) Flat sidewalks without tripping hazards. Really?


10) Car alarms are like my night time lullaby and my alarm clock now. They put me to sleep. They wake me up. 


Thankful for all of you-
Blessings!
Chris and Vickie

The Old, the New, the Secret, and the Glory… (not in that order)

So the end of last week was just a bit weird, since the Ecuadorian folks have paired up a couple of holidays back to back, and then these holidays run up against a Friday so, you guessed it, they take that day off as well. All that means is that we finally had a couple of days out of the school routine to enjoy together. I have not seen so many closed storefronts since Christmas day in the states.

During this slack point in the schedule, our family got to make a trek with another family from our house church to the Old City part of Quito. We really only touched on some of it, so I look forward to more in the days ahead, but let it suffice to say that it is quite fascinating to look at the place, where at least 500 years of culture have blended in one spot.

Take a look at this wonderful spot for a relatively new church plant to meet together out in a small town about an hour away in the rural area East of Quito. We were so humbled to ride out on a Sunday morning with our friend Les, a very kind Ecuadorian pastor/church planter, to visit and help them clean and organize the tiny donated space. We stopped along the way in a village to pick up some paint to cover up the moldy ceiling. A pig was being slaughtered 25 feet away from our van as we awkwardly waited.  I was so thankful to be able to pray for these brothers and sisters in Christ as a group as they begin meeting together there in the town.

If you don’t know it yet, the Lord graciously allowed us to host Secret Church here at Alliance Academy. Keep in mind, this was at the final day of a 3-day holiday and on a Friday night also, and we still had almost 30 people attend! It was an incredibly encouraging time to be worshipping through the word with other believers in Ecuador, and Birmingham, and around the world.

In addition, we had the chance to gaze at the glory of God through His creation as we rode a cable car up the side of Pichincha, and then hiked a breathless trail onward and upward to about 13,500 feet to catch a quick glimpse of Rucu Pichincha volcano’s peak (over 2000 feet higher than this photo point) before the clouds engulfed us all on the mountain.

We are thankful for God’s glory expressed in each of you and would ask for you to pray for us as we seek Christ more to use us to be the gospel to kids and parents and teachers placed here from 23+ countries. Pray for us to be wise about leading our own children, and especially for our children scattered on 3 continents. We face an interesting array of opportunities daily that can detract from our focus on gospel advance, so we seek you to pray early and often for how best to make disciples in our family and with our family.

Blessings!

Chris and Vickie and family

The view from my window…

When you look out my window about 5:30AM, if the sky is a purple shade of clear, you can see the volcano Cayambe (kah- yahm- be) clearly stretching up into the horizon over the other peaks nearby it. It stands there, silently capped with snow, posing behind a foreground full of streetlights and houses of all shapes and sizes and income levels. This is Quito. Each direction you look, and each time of day you look, everything is slightly different from the moment before. Our apartment here in the lower floor of an older house, is located on the side of the lower slopes of another volcano called Rucu Pichincha. From here we walk a flat 30 yards and then make a hard left turn downhill, dodging taxis and buses all the way to our international school. The trip back home is a whole other cardiovascular experience.

But more than what I see geographically, I see other things as well. I see a school community, composed of teachers and students from a variety of places and backgrounds. I see a diverse parent community, with hopes and dreams and fears just like families in Birmingham, who struggle with teenagers and marital issues and special needs kids, and every other thing under the sun.

Besides the multiple array of cultures represented in the school, there are multiple economic levels represented as well. Some families have been graced by God to be scholarship recipients for their kids to attend. Literally, some parents and students and siblings are sleeping in tiny apartments nearby on foam mattresses, while the parents travel to work an hour away each morning as their kids go to school.

I even know one case with a sibling group of young Ecuadorian kids who are being cared for and educated here at AAI, whose parents aren’t even truly identified at this point, because the person they were living with has multiple identities. Neither the courts or the school knows the ages of these kids, because the documents just plain don’t exist for the environment where they were born. There are parents who have chosen careers over their family. They make a really good living by being gone, and I mean gone all the time. They choose the school because they hear that it has good values, and a US style of teaching. Then we get to deal with the aftermath of missing discipline in the kid’s lives. So North American culture has no monopoly on interesting family situations. This is at least some of what I see.

Bottom line is this. The Gospel has power to save, and this I clearly see. I have been specifically asking in recent days for God to use AAI to save many women and men. So yesterday when I met and shared a word about disciple-making with a group of Latin American pastors who volunteer at the school, one of them told me how a lady came to the office in the last couple of days to meet for counseling. This parent shared that she was not a Christian, but her husband was a Christian. She continued by saying that after she came to AAI this year with her child, she saw that the Christianity that her husband claimed to have was nothing like the Christianity she was seeing from people at AAI, and she wanted to know Christ like that! My Latin American brother was able to share Gospel truth with her and see her trust in Jesus Christ to save her soul that day. So, as I looked out my window this morning in the chilly air, I didn't just see geography, but I saw clearly yet again how God answers our prayers that glorify His Son, even when we can’t see or imagine the end result.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(John 1:14 ESV)

The Gospel and S.E.W.

First, thank you for being patient with our blog post delay. We have just changed locations for our family to be more centrally located for ministry here in the city of Quito! But we will talk more about that in a few moments!

So what’s SEW? Here at the foot of Pichincha Volcano in Quito, Ecuador, at Alliance Academy International, it means Spiritual Emphasis Week at the school. This past week, the entire group of secondary students at our school from Ecuador, China, Japan, Indonesia, Jordan, Colombia, Korea, (and the list continues…) all got 5 straight daily segments of biblical proclamation just before lunchtime each day here at the school. A pastor from an Acts 29 church in Guatemala shared each day by “Busting Myths about God” which seems to be an incredibly needy thing in various cultures around the world, and not just in Ecuador.

We set up the week by having panel discussions several days beforehand in a variety of settings and times, where students asked basically any question they wanted to ask about God. Our team spent hours praying for God to speak to their hearts through His word. God does not disappoint when it comes to the glory of His Name because at mid-week, 20-25 students indicated that they have now placed their trust in Jesus Christ for the very first time! Please join us in thanking God for this response to His Gospel, and in asking Him for further opportunities to make disciples through their lives! We are humbled at His grace shown to us in this work.

So now back to the relocation to Quito for our family. Just to refresh everyone on our current family setup: We have an adopted son who is a senior in High School and is living with another family in the U.S. We also have two daughters currently studying at Mississippi State, working as RA’s in the University housing system. We also have one adopted son, who has graduated out of high school, and he is temporarily with us here in Ecuador. We are examining if obtaining a Visa might be an effective plan for him right now. In addition, we have another 18 year-old adopted son who is currently living in Ukraine, and we are praying and working toward helping him see the Gospel and ultimately gain independence in life. Obviously this leaves 4 more children here in Ecuador with us, specifically two biological and two adopted children, who are currently with us at AAI in grades 12,9, 8 and 7.

My role as Director of Spiritual Life here at Alliance Academy International is providing multiple avenues for ministry as God provides frequent disciple-making opportunities. The exciting part is that many of these are with bi-lingual nationals or through bi-lingual expatriates who have direct influence into the lives of nationals here! The Lord has clearly displayed His presence and power for multiplying the gospel through making disciples, and the immediate chance to have impact here despite the language barrier is a very significant part of this display.

Christ has continued to increase my desire, as part of the leadership team here, to invest more fully during the weekdays into this work here in the city. Our school CSO groups, which have adult leaders and High school students working together, meet on each Wednesday until around 6 PM. Their areas of ministry are numerous and widespread in scope (hospitals, street kids, English tutoring, orphanage work, etc.) By God’s amazing design, the ultimate shape and direction of these ministries at Alliance Academy International are a part of my responsibilities here. Also, our Counseling and Chaplaincy programs are extensive ministry areas at Alliance. The Chaplaincy program is one of the most exciting opportunities to engage a diverse student body with the gospel truth that I have ever seen. The Counseling team touches dozens of struggling parent and student relationships and issues with care and gospel influence on a weekly basis, not to mention the opportunity for upcoming Gospel based seminars and leader training. Our Lord has been so gracious to provide many “pastoral care moments” with staff members here that have only really been addressed during my time on campus, unless I stay in Quito well past our normal commute time.

As a Health and Guided Resource Class (for ESL students) teacher here, Vickie has opportunities daily to provide spiritual leadership and mentoring to students and adults. Several additional avenues for gospel influence have been presented to her because of her experience level in coaching, and the Lord has clearly given her a desire to invest in those ways more in the days ahead.

God has also given me personal opportunity to work with CAF (Centro de Apoyo Familiar), which is a small group of national pastors and wives from ministries across Quito and beyond. This group volunteers their time to help minister to families here at the school. This seems to be an incredible chance to grow a disciple-making network here in country, and to possibly even aid the DMP summer disciple-making camp process through developing all these relationships!

Finally, as we have prayed together, God has also shown us that the current logistical makeup of our 9 children’s life stages points to a need for a place for some of them (or all of them) to stay with us and/or work alongside us here in Ecuador periodically. With both Vickie and I working at Alliance Academy, our schedule and location in Conocoto has presented a variety of interesting issues for our family, including safety, space, adequate rest, family discipleship time, and meal prep and study times.

As a result, we believe that God has graciously led us to be able to relocate our family into rented space in the lower floor of a house about 10 blocks up the mountain from the school campus in order to pursue what we see as the maximum disciple-making opportunities at this time. So as God has given us clarity, we have decided to step away from the Camp Development roles with Disciple-Making Partners in order to invest ourselves fully into the disciple making opportunities that He has given right in front of us here in Quito at Alliance Academy International.

Now this location change for our family to focus on disciple-making here does not diminish our desire to see the DMP Camp ministry out in Conocoto grow and prosper in disciple making! In fact, we obviously want to maintain gospel centered relational and spiritual connections with our co-laborers Bob and Ann Coe who will remain there at the camp in the Los Chillos Valle. We plan to pray for them and their family consistently, to contribute relationally and financially, and to support the entire camp work there toward all gospel purposes. We thank God for the opportunity to be in the initial development roles of the ministry there, and look forward to partnering with DMP in multiple ways in the days ahead.

So continue praying for us as we continually discover the plans of God for using our lives for His glory in this spot at this time!

        

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

        

(Matthew 28:18-20 ESV)

Lessons Learned

Last Saturday, the Coe family and the Nichols family decided to host a small gringo style “cookout” for our friends down the hill in the Davis Foundation just to say “ thank you” for their help to us in a variety of ways. We also invited a few people from Alliance Academy in Quito that have expressed interest in ministry alongside the camp and orphanage here in the valley.

Now, North Americans frequently like to cookout in the early evening. You know, a nice Saturday afternoon, some good conversations, and time to just be together. We strategically invited some bi-lingual folks to help us with the conversations. So on Friday night our two families shopped for food, and carried the multiple bags back to our little enclave in the mountainside. I think we estimated 32 people total would be in attendance. Our flat concrete roof is a great spot to host a crowd like this.

Well, our kind brothers and sisters did not tell us when they accepted the invitation, because they are so gracious as to not offend us in any way, that during these months there is a really high probability of a rainstorm after about 2 PM each day. Not that we had not experienced it before, but I think we just failed to connect the dots that it may happen on a daily basis for several days in a row.

The morning started out beautifully, and Vickie and I walked into town and bought enough strawberries for dessert to feed an army for about 2 $ from the local market. As the day progressed we accomplished some tasks and then Bob Coe fired up the grill around 4:15 PM. Yep- you guessed it. Around 5:00 PM, or right around our projected arrival time for the meal, we received what we call in the southern US as a “frog-strangler” rainstorm. Let’s put it this way. I don’t know if it is something to do with the equator or the altitude but it was raining buckets, sideways buckets.

See our photos of both food prep and wall-to-wall guests in our house. Around 30 very wet Americans and Ecuadorians all under one roof. All, despite the storm, had a good time. Now, clean up was a different story as we continued to mop muddy floors until 11PM. Thankful to be exhausted from serving our friends here.

Blessings!

 

         “… the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

 Matthew 20:28