Video - Our Future

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I am AMAZED!

Today I was checking up on how our blog and website where looking and where we could make improvements etc. As I clicked on our "cluster map" that is located to the right (near the bottom) I was brought to tears. I am so amazed at the locations around the world that happened across our blog. In some of the counties I have an idea who has visited our site but in others, I am clueless and wonder, what brought them here to our blog? God is doing incredible things around the world and I cannot wait to see people of another tribe and tongue have the opportunity to speak the name of Christ in their own language with an understanding of who He is and what He has done for THEM! God is SO WORLD minded....I find such frustrations with some who only have an American minded view. God desires the WHOLE WORLD to know Him and I ask you if that is your desire as well? May I challenge you with that.

Maybe the whole reason why you ended up on this blog is because you too, like Christ, are world minded....

To all of you out there in the other parts of the world who read our blog...THANK YOU for the encouragement you have been to me today!

~ Gretchen

Visiting the Vacation Bible School in Coalwood, MT

We were featured as the missionaries for the VBS in Coalwood for the whole week! We were able to go and show our video and share a bit about our recent trip to Vanuatu and why we are going there as missionaries.

These are GREAT kids and it was a tremendous blessing to hang out with them on Wednesday this week.

They had a program to invite their families to see what they had been working on and learning the past week. We were able to attend this and sing a Vanuatu song with the kids for their families. The theme was "Armor of God" and it was fabulous to see their armor and all that they learned. The teachers did a great job writing their own curriculum to instill awesome Biblical truths into these young lives!

Our little Gwenny

What we are up to these days

So, what on earth are we doing now that Houghton has left his work at the hospital and I am no longer teaching voice lessons? We are traveling! We are calling, e-mailing, and snail mailing churches and individuals to schedule times to visit and share about our latest trip to Vanuatu and what God is leading us to do in Vanuatu for the next umpteen years.

So if you are a church or an individual who is interested in having us come and share with your church or small group or whatever...let us know. This is the whole point in us quitting our "jobs", so we can now be free to travel and hook up with people around the United States and invite them to join with us in bringing Christ to Ni-Vans!

We also are planning on attending pre-field orientation in Georgia which lasts for two weeks in July. We will be meeting up with our whole team, the Jones family, Gibb family, Laura Thulesen, and also the potential teammates, the Kenner family. This will be the first chance that we will all be in the same place at the same time BEFORE all moving to Vanuatu together! We will be using this opportunity to build strategy and also continue to develop our relationships with each other etc. We are so excited for these two weeks to come! Please pray for us as we look at travel options to get to GA! I really do not want to drive with our two little ones across the country and we are weighing out the cost of flight (exceedingly more than expected) and the cost of the drive.

We are also continuing to build relationships this summer. If you are at all interested in what God is doing in Vanuatu with us and would like to meet with us for questions or whatever....CALL US. That is the whole reason we are still here in the states!!!!!! We would LOVE to hear from you! :)

So that is what we are up to these days...visit our website for updated prayer requests and also our schedule...www.richardsroad.com.

Dedicated to Laura Faltynski

I have to say that this is dedicated to Laura because she is hilariously dedicated to researching things out on the Internet. Bryan and Laura, along with their two kids Winter and Creedon, (and other one on the way I might add) visited Miles City this weekend. We were able to chat with them for a while tonight and I am amazed and so ENCOURAGED by how much she knew about Vanuatu and whatnot just because of her interest! So, I write now to her...because I know she will soon be reading :) that I thank you! Thank you for the encouragement you are to us just by showing us that you actually read this thing that we call our blog. :)

I know many of you out there are thinking...okay...so I am totally reading this blog now too....so whats up with that? Well, LET US KNOW. We desperately need encouragement at times like now. Our road is long ahead of us and we face some interesting transitions in our lives and we humbly ask you to let us know if God has given you a word of encouragement through this blog, through our lives, or through some other avenue!

So again thank you Laura! This ones for you! ;)

Memorial Day Weekend with Family

Jesiah is catching bubbles with his Great-Grandma Donna. We spent Memorial Weekend in Terry with Houghton's family that were still in town from Bethany's wedding. It was so good to hook up with them again. We don't get to see them often because they live in California and we haven't gone out that way too often.





Houghton's younger brother Tim also lives in California. He really isn't that much shorter than Houghton but the chair was too small and so Houghton ended up on Tim's lap...therefore, looking taller. ;) Thought I should add that. :)


My most favorite baby girl in the world! And also my twin I am told. ;) See any resemblance?

Houghton's sister, Bethany, gets married

Houghton's little sister, Bethany was married on Saturday, May 26th. Jesiah was the "flower girl" :) And I have to say that he did a magnificent job! We were constantly telling him throughout the day that he need to walk slow and boy did he follow directions! The groom's, Waiman, nephew carried the pillow and kept telling Jesiah to "come on". It was adorable. This was Jesiah's first wedding! What a little handsome man he is! Don't you agree? Houghton put the cake on the cake stands...I stood a far off so as not to be to blame if something happen to it! It was a beautiful cake.
Jesiah is a little "ladies man" with this wink he learned from grandpa Thulesen!
The married couple. Bethany and Waiman Leung.
Houghton's mom's mom....wow it is weird to type that out...and Gwen and I at the reception dinner.
Bethany and her new husband live in GA just outside of Atlanta. Waiman will be leaving for Iraq in August to spent 18 months there.

Women of Faith Conferance

Pam Polesky, Andi Gardner, Karen Austin, and I all went to Billings for the Women of Faith conferance. I LOVED hanging out with these ladies and totally enjoyed our fellowship along with the speakers and such from the conferance.

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Presenting in Broadus Elementary

We had the awesome opportunity to drive to Broadus, which is about 80 miles South of Miles City, and tell the elementary students about Vanuatu. It was a blast. We brought a short video and some Vanuatu "souvenirs" to show them and then had a question and answer time. Houghton and I had a great time sharing with these energetic little bodies about something that makes our semi-old bodies energetic...moving to Vanuatu to tell Ni-Vans about Christ.

I really wish I would have remembered our camera so I regret to say that I do not have any pics of the school.

We are hoping to get a chance to share with the public schools here in Miles City as well. What an excellent age to open their eyes to the world! Especially here in Montana, we can forget that there are other cultures out there and that even though they are so different from us, we still can be a part of the lives of the people across the world from us!

Thank you all who were praying for us as we shared today. We were well received and had a lot of great questions.

some pics for you to pick

Click the picture and then you can view a list of pictures! Enjoy~

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Sharing about our trip

We are scheduled to talk about our trip to Vanuatu on Wednesday at 6:30 in Miles City, MT at Grace Bible Church. We hope to be answering some of the following:

Why Vanuatu?
Why are you missionaries?
When are you going?
How long are you planning to stay there?
Are your kids going with you?
What is Vanuatu like; socially, linguistically, economically, religiously, etc.?
Are you going there by yourselves?

Etc.

If you can come we would LOVE to answer any questions you have.

We will be showing pics and video from our resent trip and Houghton will be sharing a bit from the Word and Gretchen will also be sharing through song.

We hope to see YOU there!!!

If you cannot come or do not live in Miles...but would like for us to come to YOUR city, let us know and we will try to hook up with your church to share with your congregation. Just let us know!!

10 ways to aviod being a missionary

This was something I found online and found it interesting!

1. Ignore Jesus' request in John 4:35 that we take a long hard look at the fields. Seeing the needs of people can be depressing and very unsettling. It could lead to genuine missionary concern.(John 4:35 "Do you not say, `Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest."

2. Focus your energies on socially legitimate targets. Go after a bigger salary. Focus on getting a job promotion, a bigger home, a more luxurious car, or future financial security. Along the way, run up some big credit card debts.

3. Get married to somebody who thinks the great commission is what your employer gives you after you make a big sale. After marriage, embrace the socially accepted norms of settling down, establishing a respectable career trajectory and raising a picture-perfect family.

4. Stay away from missionaries. Their testimonies can be disturbing. The situations they describe will distract you from embracing whole-heartedly the materialistic lifestyle of your home country.

5. If you happen to think about missions, restrict your attention to countries where it's impossible to openly do missionary work. Think only about North Korea, Saudi Arabia,China and other closed countries. Forget the vast areas of our globe open to missionaries. Never, never listen to talk about creative access countries.

6. Think how bad a missionary you would be based on your own past failures. It is unreasonable to expect you will ever be any better. Don't even think about Moses, David, Jonah, Peter or Mark, all of whom overcame failures.

7. Always imagine missionaries as talented, super-spiritual people who stand on lofty pedestals. Maintaining this image of missionaries will heighten your own sense of inadequacy. Convincing yourself that God does not use ordinary people as missionaries will smother any guilt you may feel about refusing to even listen for a call from God.

8. Agree with the people who tell you that you are indispensable where you are. Listen when they tell you that your local church or home country can't do without you.

9. Worry incessantly about money.

10. If you still feel you must go, go out right away without any preparation or training. You'll soon be home again and no one can ever blame you for not trying.

Taken from http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/10ways.htm

Our trip in a nutshell. Coconut shell that is.

How do your sum up three weeks? I struggle with where to start! First off thanks to all who prayed for our trip. God was definitely at work and we experienced answers to prayer and know that it was because so many of you where on your knees in prayer on our behalf and cannot thank you enough!

I will try to quickly give you a run down of happenings on our trip and my, Gretchen, impressions etc.

First day (March 16th) drove 12 hours to Boise, ID to pick up Laura my sister. The kids did remarkably well during the drive. They played and slept the whole way and didn't throw much of a fit when we needed to get back on the road after lunch! Praise God.

We stayed in Boise for a day and a half then flew to LA to stay for 2 days with JJ The (previously Archer a long time friend of mine) and her new husband Chris. I really enjoyed seeing JJ again and also Kevin Orr both of whom I hadn't been able to hang out with since high school. I am so thankful to Chris and JJ for finding places for all 6 of us to stay until the 20th when our flight left for Vanuatu.

We took off for Vanuatu on the 20th at 11:30 pm with a 15 hour stop in Fiji. This was were I really experienced answer to prayer. Both kids SLEPT almost the whole 10 1/2 hour flight! I had been anxious about this leg of our trip. Jesiah loves flying and we weren't sure how Gwen would react. But on this long flight she did fabulous!



While in Fiji we rented a room at a hotel kind of place for the day so the kids could nap (in theory) and we all could hang out and relax. We were able to get a peak at Fiji a bit that day as well.
Here is were I will begin to explain to you the fascination that the women in the South Pacific had with Gwen! I am not exaggerating at all when I say that virtually every woman we passed on the street or saw anywhere for that matter either touched her, held her, or oohed and ahhed over her! Both in Fiji and in Vanuatu, women would come up and literally take her out of my arms and walk off with her (until she started to cry that is, it was then that they promptly brought her back). I have to tell you that I was thrilled about this! For some reason I wasn't nervous about her absence at all! I welcomed the break! :) Jesiah was pretty concerned when his sister was taken away though. What a great protective brother. I suppose these women do this because they never see white babies. All have probably seen white adults, but what other American mother of a 6 month old would bring her baby to the South Pacific? So we were quite a sight for the locals I am sure.

We flew into Port Villa, Vanuatu after 2 hours from Fiji. It was an amazing feeling to step out of the plane onto the land that God has called us to. Relief, in part because it was on this short flight we realized that Gwen has serious pain with the altitude change on the plane and showed us all this by her frustration on the plane, and also relief in part that we were going to be getting some idea of what the next 30 or so years of our lives were going to look like.

For an excellent run down of our locations and dates check out Laura's blog located to the right under "links". Laura is an excellent details person and I highly recommend reading her blog. I on the other hand am NOT a details person and so from this point I will kind just give you random thoughts of mine on our trip. :)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to eat, sleep, and breath moment by moment, day by day, in a sauna? Well, if you are curious what the weather was like in Vanuatu a sauna is the best explanation of what it feels like! It is smokin' hot! I don't think I have ever sweat so much in my life! We were visiting during the end of the rainy season so it rained most of the days we were there which meant 100% humidity. I think all my clothes stretched out a full size so everything was damp and stinky for 2 weeks.

The kids did interesting things because of the heat. Both got quite lethargic but I have so say that Gwen handled it the worse. She developed quite a heat rash and I had to put some baby powder on her to help with the rash. I also had to set her down and hold her less because I found that the rash was in the print of my hands around her from holding her. But miraculously this cleared up as soon as I set her down to be by herself more often. However she then started showing that she was being bit by something. We still are unsure of what was biting, either mosquito's or ants...or bed bugs ... not sure... needless to say we had to take drastic measures and rent a hotel room (for an outrageous amount of money because of air conditioning) so she would not get worse and develop threatening symptoms.

For an example of threatening symptoms....Laura got a mosquito bite that was itched open and then got infect (in 48 hours) became literally life threatening and she got cellulitus and a fever. She had to take antibiotics and soak her leg to get the swelling down and to stop the cellulitus from spreading to other parts of her body. When in tropical climates...any ailment is intensified drastically.
Thank God Gwen seemed to be fine beside the look of the bites that are still on her a week later.

I often gave Jesiah and Gwenny baths to cool them off.

Since Houghton is a Registered Nurse he will be able to help the Ni-Van people in a huge way as well as the rest of our team. As I briefly mentioned above about Laura's leg getting infected easily, there are a number of skin problems, broken bones, etc. that people would normally just allow to fester and eventually die from because of lack of medical help or supplies. Here is Houghton looking after a nasty wound on Steve, one of our team members, leg.

While we were in Vanuatu the guys took three days to go to a neighboring island of Malakula. Me and the kids (along with my dad and sister) felt it best to stay at our lodging on the island of Santo where we knew we would have normal accommodations. The guys ended up stay a couple of the nights in a tin shack and I was thankful that we stayed behind. They were surveying the island with the intentions of looking into what it would look like for us to live on that island and serve as missionaries on that island. They got a warm welcome and it looks very promising for us to eventually move to that island after we have learned the language and some of the culture on one of the main islands in the main city of Vanuatu (either Port Vila or Luganville).

Here is a picture of Malakula from our plane ride between islands. When we get more pictures from our teammates I will add some pics from their trip to Malakula.

I will end the blog here so as to get this published for you all and will post more as we get more pics.

This is when we visited a bush village.

You can see Jesiah on the far right playing with another little boy.

Eating breakfast in one of the Ni-Vanuatu cooking hut. Her son is sitting next to me.

Here are the kids under our mosquito net. You HAVE to sleep under these nets because of the huge amount of mosquitoes around and the diseases that they carry.

New Photos of the kids

The perfect pair. :)


Giving kisses


Our big girl sitting up! She is 6 months old already.


Giving kisses after I caught him in my makeup and he put on lip liner and "chapstick" as he called it. :)

Survey Trip Itinerary

Our survey trip to Vanuatu is a mere week away! I cannot believe how fast our time for which we were supposed :) to be preparing has passed and that our trip is now upon us! We are anxious and nervous for numerous reasons. Excited to meet the Ni-Vans and be face-to-face with the people we feel God has lead us to, and nervous because of the 13 hour plane ride with our two kids. ;)

I would like to ask you to pray for us. For safety, for us to remember all that we are hoping to record from this trip, for well behaved children, for the number of back and forth traveling that will be done while in country between islands etc...

I have included an itinerary that is as accurate as we could make it at this point. This way you will be able to pray for us by location and what we will be doing various days...etc.

March 16 (Fri) - drive from Miles City to Boise, ID to meet up with Laura (my sister)

March 18 (Sun) - fly from Boise to LA and hang out with friends

March 20 (Tues) - fly from LAX to Port Vila (13 hour flight)

March 22(Thurs) - overnight in Port Vila on Efate island with accommodations very cheaply rented from SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics http://www.sil.org/, similar to Wycliffe Bible translators http://www.wycliffe.org/)

March 23 (Fri) - fly to Santo to Luganville (meet missionary Phil who may be helping us apply for visas at the end of the trip, check out cost of living, possibly visit a church, record some Bislama to practice language while back in the States) with accommodations provided by Phil

Sometime here possibly... Sometime during this time the guys are thinking of flying to the island of Malakula and doing some backpacking into tribes to get a feel for the people out there. We don't have concrete lodging on this island and therefore, at this point me and the kids will be staying in Santo with Laura (my sis) and Dave (my dad) unless we find some accommodations there that would house a family. Pray that this would be possible! This might be the island we end up on when we move here and I would LOVE to spend some time there because of that possibility.

April 2 (Mon) - fly back to Port Vila early AM (apply for visas, meet government officials, check in with SIL about literacy, language), stay again with SIL

April 3 (Tues) - finish visa paperwork, fly out to Fiji at 4:05PM to arrive 8:30PM, depart Fiji 10PM and arrive in LA at 1:20PM the same day. We then fly United back home to arrive at 6:55PM that evening. Is that all crazy that it's all the same day or what? We will drive back to Montana probably the next morning or so, whenever our brains are with it again to drive the 12 non-stop hours back.

Support/missionary

Hey, we are currently trying to get our website http://www.richardsroad.com/ up and running. As i was working on our, How to Support Us section I realized i have never added it to the blog so here is the link at the bottom. I have also added the link to our website on the right under links labeled, Our Website. Thanks for checkin us out and praying for us.

Support/missionary

TEAM VANUATU - Home

TEAM VANUATU - Home

more pics anyone?

Isn't she a beauty?














Dad hanging out with the kids!

















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