Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you!

Over the past couple months, God has done a lot of work in Amber and I. We could not have expected what He was going to do or what would come from these months but as Amber and I choose to stay open to His leading, He continues to do good work in us even when it is hard to accept.

I will share mainly about one thing that God has spoken to us and later I will send another update with regard to what this means for our future.

Nepal and Taiwan

Amber and I recently went on an outreach to Nepal with a team of people from Montana where we were able to help start digging the foundations for a school in a small village.

Our plan was to go to Nepal, serve the people, preach the gospel, and make strong connections for our future move. This seemed like a good plan and one that we were excited about. We arrived and started to make connections, visited with people that I had met before, started building friendships and various connections, and met with our team to prepare for the village trek.

We had an opportunity to share in a young boy’s discipleship time, to share in a house church and also in the church that was in the village. Then afterward, we worked on the school which was more like digging and carrying rocks all day for every day that we were in the village, along with praying for people and getting to know the locals.

All of this seemed good and fine and we hoped that we were making a difference in some way. But when I arrived in Nepal, Amber noticed something in me that she hadn’t noticed in Taiwan. She said that I seemed excited and at peace about everything including the difficult and frustrating things. Nepal is a very polluted and poor country with many issues which makes living there difficult, but none of this seemed to bother me which became extremely evident in my behavior.

 

This got me thinking…

I realized that I had not been this way living in Taiwan and so I started praying. God showed me that I had only been viewing Taiwan as a “pit stop” on my way to Nepal and that I had not been fully engaged in the way that I was in Nepal. I had convinced myself that I was involved in Taiwan enough and that I was doing what I was supposed to do but in reality, I had been holding back. In language, relationships, emotionally, etc..

I got very honest with myself and was able to recognize that this behavior of viewing Taiwan as a pit stop is dishonoring to the nation. It is also not fully valuing the call that God had given me. I began to start appreciating Taiwan a lot more and continued to pray for about a month, asking God what He wants me to do.

I wanted to be sure that I was not going to make a disobedient decision. I also met someone who was living in Nepal and this person expressed how they wished that they were called somewhere else other than Nepal…. I felt that this was dishonoring of their calling and I got a glimpse of my own behavior in Taiwan…. 

I heard God speaking clearly to me and so I asked Amber also to pray, but I told her that I didn’t want to tell her anything that God was saying to me until she had heard from God herself. God told me what He was going to tell Amber and then later, Amber told me what God had said and it turned out that it was the same as what He told me He would say.

I have felt for 3 and a half years now that I would be heading to Nepal and I have seen nothing else. I have been blinded to anything else. I brushed off people’s ideas of the possibility of anything else. I feel so silly in doing that now because I feel very strongly that I need to change the behavior I have had in Taiwan. 

We thought the outreach to Nepal was a recon trip to prepare for moving there, but God showed us something different..  Amber and I now strongly feel like God brought us there to reshape out hearts for Taiwan. We have made a difficult decision, but one that we believe is what God wants.

We have decided that we will no longer be viewing Taiwan as a pit stop. We have decided to fully engage in Taiwan and to put Nepal on the shelf. Taiwan will be our home and mission place for the foreseeable future. This will mean a lot of changes for both of us but the first one will be language learning. Starting in February, Amber and I will be diving fully into learning Chinese so that we can serve Taiwan to our best capacity and reach more people with the Gospel of Jesus! 

We want to say thank you so much for standing with us in support as we serve here. We are already seeing changes in ourselves as we are engaging more with Taiwan and it is very exciting! 

I will be sending out another update in about a month that will have more details about our future roles in Taiwan. Please keep us in prayer as these changes have some big challenges. God bless you!

For a video of our time in Nepal – Nepal Video

Love is the Answer, Humility is the Key, Jesus is the Way!
Your brother, sister and friends,

Jacob and Amber President

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