So I decided I was never going to be a
teacher, I was never going to be a
missionary, and I was never gonna
live overseas.
Up until I was about 16, that's kind of what
I had in my head. 
Mandy and I both went to Houghton College in
upstate New York.
And Mandy was eating an apple and then she set it down, but not standing
upright, like on the fleshy side of the
apple
down on the carpet. And I turned to
her and I said,
"Wow, you really are a missionary
kid, aren't you?"
And she looked at me, picked up the
apple, and rolled it across the carpet and
took another bite.
And right away I just thought, "Okay. She might make a good missionary wife."
And we went to see
Little Women together,
and he cried, so I knew that he was, you know,
empathetic.
Originally my role on the team
was as a translation advisor, but in the
last two years I've also become
the team leader for the project, being
responsible for,
you know, a lot of the planning and the
logistics and the reporting,
computer support. I could go on and on.
My to-do list has like thirty
different categories on it, and
that's the only way I can even
attempt to stay on top of everything.
Because his role has become bigger, I've
had to really reduce my roles
outside my family. So the
things that I do
really are related to my family and the
team.
My oldest, Josiah, is almost fourteen.
He really loves music, so I think that's
one of the things that stands out.
Our next oldest is 12. Noah just turned 12,
and he's our adventure boy. He really likes,
you know, if there's a tree to be climbed or
something to be leaped off of
that's him. And Ellie is nine.
She's our artistic child. Anytime you see
her she's
drawing or cutting something up. And then of course there's the twins,
Jacob and Jenny Beth. They're three and a
half years old now.
What can we say about the twins?
In a lot of ways our teammates are kind of like our family.
We have pretty deep relationships
with each other
because we live and work together, but
one of the things that we do
as the team leaders is every Wednesday
we host everybody for
lunch. It's lunch and prayer. It's not time
to talk about business, but it's time to talk
about
our prayer requests and how we can pray for the
translators.
We know the intimate details of their
lives. Like
every workshop they write out their
prayer requests for us, and they
talk to Ben during the day, and
sometimes they'll come to us in the
evenings.
I think that's where a lot of the
relational energy goes.
One of the things that we've been
trying to do
in the Aitape West project more and more
is to give
our translators opportunities to become
trainers themselves.
So everything that we do with them 
we're not only trying to equip them to
help us do a job, we're actually trying
to help them
do a job, but to do it in such a way that
they can be equipped to then help others
as well.
When you first come you're kind
of like a rock star
because everybody looks at you because
you're different.
Now that we've been here for 11 years, I
feel like people are used to us,
and so our immediate community, like
everybody in this hamlet, is kind of like
our family. So
when I'm at the market and I see somebody
from this hamlet I'm like,
"Oh yeah, that's one of our people." 
They also look after
my kids. They'll tell them to stop doing
something. Or if they see them doing
something dangerous,
they'll tell them to stop. So they kind of feel some
ownership of our kids too.
You know, we're their missionaries.
Even though we've given up a lot,
and sometimes that's hard and we
struggle with that, and we miss
things that we've left, my kids are
living with people
in the missionary community from 20
different countries.
And then they're living in the middle of
a Papua New Guinean
culture. They get to see people who
really only know
a life where they live off the land
and live very simply, and yet they have
almost everything that they need. So my
children are
gaining a whole lot. They're gaining an
education
that I think would be really hard for
them to attain
if we had stayed back home.
We don't have a lot of the props
that we would normally have in our home
country. When we come to the village
we plan for four or five weeks of food
at a time.
And so I have to think, "Okay, how many
bags of rice do I need? How many
kilos of flour? How many kilos of sugar?
How many cans of tomatoes?"
We can't just run to the grocery store at
eleven o'clock at night. Because it's
a busy life at home with all of our
children, it forces us to take a step back
and think, "Okay, what's most important? How
can we actually survive? And not just survive
but be healthy?" 
There's more to living an abundant life in Jesus than just focusing on
our work and ministry, but it's living a
full life in
relationship with our family, with our
neighbors,
with everybody we come in contact with. And
the only way we can do that is if we
focus on, the Lord needs to be number one, and
we need to able to spend time with
Him, not only on our own
but as a family. And then after that
priority
we need to make sure that our
relationships with, you know, within our
marriage
and with our children, that we're not
losing sight of that.
If I was asked, "Is it really worth it
all? Would I do this all over
again?"
I would have to say, "Absolutely yes."
And I can't always say that. There are some
moments when I think,
"Oh my gosh. What did we do to ourselves? Why did
we 
bring ourselves here?" This is really a
difficult
life sometimes.
One of the hard things
is just missing family,
because when we left the US, our twins
were nine months old.
And we're going to return and they'll be four.
It's hard for our family not to experience
the joy that we have in seeing our kids grow up, and they don't get to
see that with us.
But I keep circling back to God's purpose in our life, and
how He's called us with our unique
skills and abilities
to do His work. 
If I was home in the US
and living what I would consider like a
normal suburbian life,
I wouldn't be happy because I wouldn't
be fulfilling my purpose.
We're seeing people reading
the Bible
for the first time in their own language,
and we're seeing how powerful God's
Word is and how it's changing people's
lives
and how people are turning away from
darkness, the evil things that
they
struggle with, and that makes it all
worth it to me.
We love our friends here in Papua New
Guinea.
And they need God's Word. 
Our family and friends have all those opportunities back home.
But our friends here, they don't.
And so the Lord has called us to be here, and
it's a sacrifice,
but it's well worth the sacrifice.
