Belize 2012




On August 4, my family and I will be heading back to missions work.
This time, we are going to Belize for three weeks to help build an orphanage with Grace Bible Church.




A family of six is not cheap to ship nor house.
We have to raise $2000  more dollars before June to make this two week  family mission trip a reality.




And that’s the Mission.




Our Goal:

• Use this time to bring together the whole family. (Including that kid who moved off to college recently…)
• Examine possible permanent mission work in that area.
• Spread God’s love and be a blessing to those we meet.




Belize 2012:

We will be helping “Samuel’s Sanctuary,” which has partnered with “Orphanos Foundation.” Samuel’s Sanctuary is a new orphanage being opened up by missionaries Dino Roseland, his wife, and daughter. The Roseland’s were previous members of our church.

The orphanage will be a multi-functional facility dedicated to at-risk children, ministry training and will include:

• Dormitories for orphaned, abandoned, and abused children.
• Housing for young, single mothers and their children.
• A hostel for short-term mission teams and interns.
• A center for discipling the Belizean people and training missionaries.

Specifically, our group will be participating in work projects around the property and providing a Vacation Bible School for the children.






The Challenge:

I have been blessed to cross paths with a lot of great people and I look forward to meeting more. If each person who visited this blog donated a dollar and then shared this challenge to donate on facebook and twitter, my family and I would be well on our way to fully funded.

So, here is the the deal… Donate a dollar, like our facebook page, share this with facebook friends and Tweet about it.





But there are some goodies attached.



The Music… And More.

Music: I have written songs and have finally been able to record them. In return for donating, you can pick a song (or more) of your choice. Check out “Nathan’s Music” for the selections, and stay tuned because there is more coming weekly.

Exley Family Apiary: Also… We are going to be raffling off some of our most famous Exley Products (honey, bees wax lip balm, home made soap, and the epicness goes on). You can check out the baskets also on the“Nathan’s Music” page.



Will You Take the Challenge?

Donate a dollar, like our facebook page, share the challenge with facebook friends and Tweet about it.
As always, we would covet your prayers as we prepare for this incredible trip. I will keep yall updated via the facebook page, so make sure to follow us there!

God Bless!

First Day of English Day Camp

July fourth was the first day of camp, and I got a great group of kids.  We spent the day doing projects and activities in English and it was fun to help them master our language a little bit more each day. In Germany, knowing how to speak English is like having a masters degree.

A note on German society:

In Germany the majority of Germans are Protestant or Catholic. It is no crime to be religions, in fact we were living in and holding the English Day Camp at a protestant school. Those titles, however, do not mean the same thing that they do over here. When we were there, we found that it is expected that one should be religious and attend church, but it makes no impact on their beliefs. The super majority of Germans are Agnostic or Atheistic, and about the same number believe that the Bible is just a book of fairy tales.

This facet worked to help us in talking with the kids about our own faith, because they understood some of the basic concepts (having been familiar with some form of church). However, there is another side to German piety that became a stumbling block for us and our new friends. The best way to turn any German off, is to preach at them or try to force them to believe something or ‘make a choice for Christ’. The reason for this, is because they are very independent (ESPECIALLY the youth), they prefer to lead themselves, and the horrors of the Crusades are still ingrained into their memories. Thus, giving them a very unfriendly view of ‘Christians’ and an all around anti-evangelical attitude.

This is what made the mission trip such a blast for me. It was right in my ball park. In stead of sharing our faith right off the bat (like we could do harmlessly here in America) we had to ASK QUESTIONS. Every day during club time, our camp director would give a message in German on the Lords prayer (a neutral topic, since it is an accepted part of their established religion). However, the lords prayer is almost the gospel message in itself. So what he did was he took a familiar part of their religion split it into pieces and used those pieces to, in a less pushy way, share the Gospel. After his message, we would sit together in our groups and discuss it.

This is where the questions came in. At the beginning of the week, there was a lot of contradictions and discussion. Another thing that I love about the German youth is that they have been trained to be ‘self taught,’ so our group wasn’t hesitant in discussing this new idea, questioning it or arguing for or against it. As the group leaders, my co-leader and I lead the discussion through asking questions, which they actually legitimately considered.

It was refreshing.

In America it is difficult to get teenagers to sit down and talk about religion. But in Germany, the youth are so open and honest that it was easy to lead by inquiry. When the discussions began, the first  thought that came across the table was, “you know, we already don’t believe that God exists. So why are we discussing it?” Fair enough. They also believe in being open minded (especially towards homosexuals) and so we replied that they should have the same attitude toward us. Discussion continued.

A beauty contest between two group leaders. Two teams of students were given make up and a leader and the results were hysterical. This is contestant No. 1, before...

...and after. That is a wig he is wearing btw.

Contestant No. 2 Before...

...and after...

... and there was some make up left over to share.

Clothes pin contest. The goal was to get as many pins on their faces as possible. It looked like it hurt... a lot. The guy in the white tee is my youth pastor.

Germany Mission Trip: Day two

Day two was  a Sunday and what made it memorable was the fact that on that day, I got ripped off by a monkey.

Yup.

Here is the deal… Before we went to church that morning, we dropped by the Brandenburg Gate. At large tourist attractions, it is common for the locals to put on costumes and have the tourists take their pictures with them. So, it came to pass that, as we were strolling about the gate, a person in a monkey suit approached my friend (who was holding a camera) and offered to get a picture with him, which my friend gladly agreed to do. Once they were finished, the monkey looks at me and motions for me to do it too. I wasn’t too keen on the idea, because the costume was rather shabby and somewhat grotesque. But apparently, the guy thought that everyone needed a photo of the Brandenburg Gate with a wild looking monkey and a sunburned tourist.  He was persistent and I gave in… “at least he isn’t charging anything,” I thought.

*sigh* I find some things out at the wrong times. We took the picture, and as we were walking away he took a tin can out of his getup and shook it. “Okay, I was wrong. He does charge.” I begrudgingly took out twenty Euro cents and handed them to him… He handed them back and said, “Two Euros.”

Just in case you don’t know, two Euros is the equivalent of three dollars. I should have walked away. I really should have. But I didn’t. And that is how I got ripped off by a Monkey.

It wasn’t funny when I was there, but now, it makes for good memories and a smile… If I ever get over it. Never trust a guy in a monkey suit.

The Church service was my favorite event of the day because they were having their annual international worship service. I was enthralled by all the different styles of worship. Natives of France, Singapore, Africa, Brazil and even Germany came up and sang in their native tongue and ethnic style. It was fantastic. Each one was so unique, but they all had a common purpose.

 

The Brandenburg Gate

A note on German food (will be added too in later post, but I have got to mention this): I like food. German food proved to be no exception. For lunch, I had a sandwich that looked like (but did not taste like) it been run over by a truck (it had actually just been press toasted). Great food.

Dressed for photo's. Which one is live and which one is fake? One is Fake. It was crazy how realistic these people could be.

More realistic posers.

Germany Mission Trip

Wow, I am really, really, late on getting this out. Sorry about that. It is hard to negotiate with moving out when you want to do something as “trivial” as write. *sigh*

Anywho… to write about the whole experience all at once would make a ridiculously long post, so I am doing one post for each day of the trip and there should be two to three days between each post.

GERMANY WAS INCREDIBLE!!!

It was an excellent ‘first time off the continent.’  Despite the fact that I lost my camera on the flight up, I managed to collect pictures from my friends who were with me. So, I will have pictures.

All eight days were spent in Berlin. The trip up was 15 hours, with layover in New York. When we landed in the Berlin airport, the first thing that struck me was that everyone was speaking conversational German. I don’t know why it caught me off guard, I mean, I was in Germany after all. Graffiti is the wallpaper of Berlin; as common as bubble gum on the sidewalk. But much of it was artistic enough to make me take a second look. It is not like the graffiti we have here.

We were staying in a Protestant school that was set back from the street and surrounded by very large tall trees and other buildings. It was a beautiful place, with a puzzling forest of brick, limb, graffiti, leaf, bird, and motorcycle. Our dorm was a classroom on the third floor (they called it the second because they count the first floor as zero) and it had tall screen-less windows spanning one whole wall. Those windows were a pleasure to have. I could open them, lean out, look down, and soak in the fresh air. If I looked across the school yard/sports field I could see an art museum of sorts. At night, each row of windows in that museum would light up with a different color, making it look like a giant cake made of neon lights. It was quite spectacular.

An interesting note on the culture: We went to the mall to eat that evening, and what I saw there was not necessarily a surprise, but it served to cause me to see consistencies throughout the rest of the week. In Germany, women are degraded in the name of art and advertising. The girls that came to the camp the following days demonstrated the effect it was having; they dressed according to the image portrayed in the mall and other places. It wasn’t as much of a shock, because we have it here in America as well. The difference, is that I know where it most commonly is America, and I can avoid it. In Germany, I didn’t know.

This a section of a mural that spanned the whole wall of the German’s IRS building (something to that effect). It was painted to represent what the German people had thought socialism would be like. In the mural, they envisioned themselves as being happy and prosperous.  But in reality, that is not how it turned out. On the ground in the courtyard, a few yards away, there was another mural, (or rather a blown up, black and white, photo) laid on the ground like a rectangular goldfish pond. It was a picture of what socialism had actually been. The people in it were dark, hungry, cold, and impoverished.

America is Similar to Germany in many ways.