Pictures from St. Vincent

St. Vincent

Hello everyone,

Renita and I arrived in St. Vincent Jan. 9th and we have had a full week already gone by here. We have had a board meeting and we are also working on setting things up for our outreach team that arrives on the 19th in St. Vincent. We did some speaking in churches and schools as well which was very faith stirring to see the faces that Renita and I will be living with in the next 5 months.
This morning we are headed to Mayreau to do some further examination of the island and what will be possible with work teams and shipping containers.
This week has been very good for us as a board. We have been able to figure a lot of things out with the help of Renita's parents (Ron and Erma Weaver) and also Wes and Renae Nolt. The board here is being spearheaded by Norm and Donna Chubb and also Bill Landis. We really want to thank those who have been praying. Trust me the Lord is opening doors for us that we werent sure would open.
It has also been a decently relaxing week were Renita and I can sleep in a bit. We are staying in a decent hotel and praise the Lord we have air conditinoing in our rooms!! We are about 50 steps from the ocean line so its been nice to get out there twice in the last week for a bit and relax.
Continue to keep us in your prayers!
Also PLEASE PLEASE be in prayer for Haiti. The Caribbean Nation has had an earthquake in its Capital city "Port of Prince" and there are possible 100,000 people dead. This nation was just getting its feet back from a hurricane that hit about 2 years ago. Please lift this nation before the Lord. We have 2 YWAM bases there that were not hit and are starting relief work. Thank You for your prayers!
Blessings to All!

2nd day of outreach!

Hey everybody,
Wow it was good to be home and it sure went fast. It was awesome to be home and see friends and family and just spend Christmas at home. It was a very busy yet refreshing week. Renita and I feel charged up and ready for outreach. Thank you to all of you who shared Christmas greetings with us and sorry to the many we did not get to see, especially the body at ACTS. We look forward to seeing evreryone in mid march when we are home for break.
Outreach has officially started! We just wanted to let you all know that our team and Renita and I made it safely to Kingston by Bus. We are staying at Danya Hess's (our other staff person) parents house even though its a bit crowded, it is sweet! Our view looks out over the City of Kingston which makes up 1/3rd of the population in Jamaica. Propery we feel placed to stand interceding for what the Lord wants to do in Jamaica.
Today we went out to minister just down the road from where we are staying. We held an open air worship session and we got to talk with people and just bless them and chill with them. Super Awesome! We have a lot planned for the week ahead so continue to keep us in your prayers as we move forward into what God is doing in Kingston, Jamaica. We will be ministering in churches, youth groups, schools and lots of prayer walking through town. We will also continue to do open air worship tmes in key spots in Kingston.
Please pray for us as outreach leaders that we would lead with wisdom and really care for the team and be lead by the Spirit and for our marriages. The leaders are John and Danya Hess and Renita and I.
Also pray for the students - Annina Bernhard, Stephanie Tronson, Shawn Milton, and Matt Cassel - that they would hear clearly from the Lord and walk in obedience. Our group is awesome! The students rock and their hunger for God is a really fun thing to walk beside! We appreciate your prayers!
May the Lord bless you and keep you

God's Grace is Sufficient!

Wow so the last three weeks were by far the busiest weeks of the DTS thus far. We had Thanksgiving, Go Broncos! It was a great dinner we had turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes rolls, just like a nice normal Thanksgiving meal except for the 85 degree weather, shorts, t-shirt, sandals oh yeah. It was real fun! But we definitely missed home. We did also go around and share some things that we were all thankful for which was awesome!!

As for the DTS, the school has been very good we had three different topics taught in the last three weeks; The Father/Family/Mother heart of God, Spiritual Warfare, and The King and His Kingdom wich included Discipling Nations and People Groups. The Speakers were great and the class really enjoyed them.

We are sadened to say that we did have a student go home that I(Josh) poured a lot of time into into. Please pray for him. He really struggled through the school and he just decided that enough was enough and he chose to try to run from his problems. So please pray for him, his name is Jordan. This was hard on everybody so pray for the other students and staff as well. We were all rooting for him!

We did a couple other things outside of the DTS. We had a pastors prayer breakfast which was totally awesome. We hosted about 30 different pastors from different parts of Jamaica and just shared our vision as YWAM Jamaica and internationally. We got to share our vision of St. Vincent and Mayreau being discipled as well, which was really cool. It was a lot of fun to be a part of small steps of uniting the church of Jamaica for Jesus! We also did quite a number of various different outreach's hear in Montego Bay. We did get to serve by doing some demolition for a christian deaf school and we also got to go to nearby church and give the service. We look forward to doingg another church service at another church this upcoming weekend. Its awesome!!

We also got to baptize one of our students on the DTS, Silvia Moser, a 27 year old from Switzerland. Renita has worked very closely with her being her small group leader and Silvia asked Renita if we would baptize her, so we got the honor and priveledge to be apart of that big decision in her life. Honestly it floored us to be apart of that. We will never forget it!

Outreach is also coming together for Kingston Jamaica and St. Vincent and Mayreau. Please continue to pray for the Lord to really pave the road for us as we go to minister. Outreach starts on the 28th of December. Sounds like we will be working with the schools in St. Vincent and Mayreau in Devotion times in the morning and also evening services at different churches and kids events. We have a couple contacts that we will be working with when we get there so we are super excited as a team! We will also be doing a lot of servant ministry like just cleaning streets offering our services to random people and hopefully having their hearts softened and doors will be opened in sharing the Love of jesus with people.

Praise: The Lord has asked one of the DTS Students -Shawn Milton- to help pioneer YWAM SVG with us. He is an awesome 24 year old Jamaican. Please be in prayer for him as he tries to raise finances. If anyone is interested in supporting him just e-mail me.

Woohoo! We are coming home in 7 days! We are really looking forward to spending Christmas with family and friends. We will be attending Weaverland Mennonites 1st service on the 20th and we will be speaking at ACTS Covenant Felloship's service the same day. We look forward to seeing a lot of you guys there!

Thanks again for all your prayers. Trust me Renita and I really feel like the last three weeks we have been carried because we know that we would not have been able to do all that we did with out His grace and your prayers.

On the 9th Week!!

The Last two weeks have been awesome!! The 8th of Nov. to the 13th we went to Mandeville Jamaica and stayed at the YWAM base there. That week we really focused on doing outreach in the community there and team building exercises as we prepare for outreach in our individual teams. We got to go out into the town, going door to door spreading the good news of our Savior and praying with people. We got to work in the school on the property and teach in class about friendships and the qualities of a good friend. We also got to go to hold a youth service at a local church and go to a old persons home for retired veterans. It was such a great experince for us as a school. We got to sing for people, cry with people, hold people, and just show the love of God to so many people! Truly awesome!

So our outreach though for real is coming up in a little over a month. Our school is going to two different Nations besides Jamaica for outreach; St. Vincent and St. Croix. Renita and I and another couple on staff will be heading up the St. Vincent team. There are 4 students on our team. We are truly excited about this. Our team is really gelling well and the Lord is really speaking to each person on the team.

After the week in Mandeville we had an elder Jamaican woman come share on REDEMPTION and RELATIONSHIPS from the 16th to the 20th! It was truly an awesome week for Renita and I to listen to her teaching and really soak it up. She has been married for 51 years and she always tells us that her marriage continues to grow stronger each day! She is a truly precious woman! This really sparked a lot of things in the students and Renita and I were able to walk through/minister to some students at a real heart level. It is really awesome to see God be made bigger in persons lives knowing that God is actually using us to further His kingdom plans in other persons lives. We are so grateful for what the Lord is doing. Please continue to keep us in your prayers as we step into things that are unkonw to us. Praise the Lord they are not unknown to Him!

As far as outreach goes we are coming along well with direction for evangelism and ministry and accomadations, Praise God for all this! We have a contact actually on Mayreau who is the pastor of the only church on Mayreau. This is a huge answer to prayer. The pastor is really excited for us to come and minister and work along side him. We desire as a mission to partner and build up the local congregations not seperate them and hold ourselves higher than the church. This is also a very good thing as we go into long term relations with the church. We are super excited!!!!

We are doing well as a couple as well. We are looking forward to coming home for Christmas in three weeks. But we are really enjoying ourselves here in Jamaica working with the school. Its quite intense but We continue to look at each other and say "This is benefiting us more than the students." We are so blessed to be where we are even though it is hard in a lot of ways! Thanks to God for His Grace. We would be lost with out it. Thank you for your continued prayers!

7th Week: Fire to Freedom

Wow, the last three weeks have been much fuller than the weeks past. We are doing well though. The Lord is giving us Grace and He is pursuing Renita and I passionately right now. We feel like He is really purging us even more, which is kinda hard right now. But We know that it is for our own Good!

The DTS is full. We had a wonderfullast two weeks, just a little fuller than we would have liked. We didnt get to have a weekend off, we actually had a 13 hour lecture on Sat. and a 8 hour lecture on Sunday. So Renita and I are looking forward to this weekend and the students as well. This past week of teaching was on Discipline and living a life that is Concious to God. The week before that we had a Sexual Purity teaching and it was filled with ministry and some of the students and staff being set free from footholds and different things. At the end of the week of Sexual Purity the students wrote up a Covenant to God and they were given Purity Bracelets. It was excellent. The Lord used it and He is prospering us all!

One of the main things that you can be in prayer for is our planning our short term outreach in January and February. We bought our tickets and we will be flying to St. Vincent on the 8th and we wont be getting back to Jamaica until the 18th of February.

Also this upcoming week we will be going to another YWAM base in Jamaica(Mandeville) for the week. We will be evangelising and also building Team unity as we get ready for our outreach to St. Vincent. Thank you so much for all your prayers. Much blessings!!

Fire to Freedom: 5th week!

This past week and a half has been awesome! The Lord is moving and setting people free including Renita and I. We both feel like the Lord is really using us even though we are so not perfect at all. Jesus is truly walking with us, or should i say we are actually learning to walk with Him. This last week of teaching was about the Fear of the Lord. For us it really made us look inward and repent for a lot of different things that we carried for a lot of our lives. The Holy Spirit is really teaching Renita and I a lot in this season. And the students are having visual breakthrough. We got to pray with some of the students that came to us on their own and Jesus set them free from some deep stuff. Continue to hold the students and us in your prayers.

This past weekend we got to do some evangelizing in the town of Montego Bay. We took 120 meals into down town and we passed out food and prayed a lot with homeless people. It was quite an amazing experience. The students loved it and it impacted them greatly. We do evangelism once a week, last week we went to a deaf school and just loved on them. God is using us. Its awesome!! We just need to learn to step out more, we know we can be doing more!! Thank you so much for your constant prayers for Renita and I. We feel like our marriage is at its strongest point and we pray that it will continue to get stronger. We do covet your prayers and ask that you would continue to pray for breakthrough in the students lives. Thank you so much for your prayers!

This upcoming week will be even more exciting. The speaker is Nancy Harper. She is from Canada but has spent twenty years of her life ministering in the Caribbean with her husband and children. I believe she is speaking about deliverance and identity. Pray for us! The Lord is faithful!!

Josh and Renita

"But God showed His great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners!" -Romans 5:8