Leaving Escondido

Hello faithful friends.  We have moved on from our time in Escondido; more on that later.  We have landed in Yuma for at least a month to see what the Lord would have for us here.  
Please pray for wisdom and direction for outreach opportunities.  The climate here is quite warm and it appears that most people don’t leave their homes during the day due to the heat.  I guess it is kind of like a Minnesota winter, but opposite temp.

We had some really great times in Escondido.  The Lord graciously provided a place for us to camp for 7.5 months at Bethel Baptist Church.  Thank you, Bethel!  I never thought we would spend that much time in California, let alone in one place for that long.

We made some good friends along the way.  We spread his message far and wide across Escondido and were able to train/encourage others to do the same.

When we were doing prayer on the porch for many months in Escondido, we would meet many Spanish speakers.  This isn’t surprising, but we felt we needed to find a good Spanish speaking church to invite these people to.  We started to attend the Spanish service at Emmanuel Faith Church.  We had the opportunity to connect with pastor Esteban and share our testimony and our heart for the Gospel.  We soon had an opportunity to share with the congregation.

Our desire is Know God and make Him Known.  We love sharing the Gospel and by the time we attended our second service, we connected with a family that recently moved to Escondido from Ecuador.  They have a huge heart for the Gospel and would share their faith several times a week in their native country.  They are a sweet couple and soon we were out doing prayer on the porch with them.

The neat thing was they had only been attending the church one week longer than we had, but in the that short time together we went our sharing our faith several times with them.  They don’t speak any English and our Spanish is weak, but God provided enough communication to make it work.  Or should I say, Laura’s Spanish is pretty good so that was very helpful to communicate with them.  We would pair them up with our kids (Josh and Jakin can also speak enough Spanish) and they would go out together.  When they got to a Spanish speaking person, Robert or Jeannine would share the Gospel with them.  What a great partnership!

We have not closed the door on Escondido, but trying to find an apartment in a very tight market was not happening.  It is also really expensive if we were to find one.  Ministry from the parking lot of a Baptist church can’t go on forever, and certainly is not the most ideal.

Why Yuma?  Great question.  With our connection to Spanish speakers, we felt that other Spanish speaking communities could/would be open to the Gospel.  In the case of Escondido, many Hispanics would listen to me in my broken Spanish to hear what I was saying.  Cross-cultural ministry was working there, so why not somewhere else?  We have booked a campsite in a resort for the month and we will see where God takes us from there.

Please pray for God’s direction and leading to the opportunities he has prepared!

It seems that our time in Escondido was for planting many seeds of the Gospeland for watering others.  We didn’t see many salvations, but we don’t always know the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end. 

Please pray for all the conversations we had and the over 8,000 doors we knocked on.  Pray that God will work in people’s hearts.  The time is short, the Lord is coming soon!

Below is a map we had on the wall at Bethel Baptist.  It measured 5′ x 5′.  It helped us keep track of the neighborhoods we covered.