KONOMALA

Thank you all for your prayers and support for our family and the church here in Konomala. If you’re seeing this for the first time, my apologies! It came to our attention that a few of you haven’t been recieving the email notifications of new posts to our website. 

It seems like it’s been a long time since we have had much of normal/consistent routine. It’s been a lot of scattered busyness all around us as each week seems to have its own unique flavor. There have been some weeks of community events, two week-long funerals, some friends visiting, most of our friends in the church coming and going, aaand a bunch of other random things that happen no matter the season. 

a couple highlights: 

We got to spend a little over a week with our friends Matt & Karissa along with their two boys. They live in a different part of PNG at one of our main support areas on the mainland. They’ve faithfully served for a number of years to encourage, support, and care for all of our friends and coworkers here in PNG. 

It was great having them here with their boys who quickly became good buddies with our girls. They were all troopers for sure having to travel in & out the hard way on rough seas and long hours on the road. 

There have been a handful of really good opportunities recently to talk with people in the midst of big life events. For the most part we just try to keep pointing people to the answers offered to us in the good news of Jesus’ finished work and the good news of His Spirit now working in us. Some of the conversations have been with people that I haven’t seen in years…others have been with people we see regularly, but circumstances have brought some things back to the surface. 

a couple lowlights: 

We have had two more deaths in our immediate community over the last few weeks. Death is so in your face here which is always sad and very real. Sitting around for a lot of hours with people did create a couple chances to have those good conversations with some friends though. 

There has been a whole variety of things that have pulled people in the church in lots of directions. Traveling, work/money busyness, sickness, conflict, family struggles, cultural demands, personal struggles … the list doesn’t really ever end. It’s all made for a scattered inconsistency in our lives together which can feel like it snowballs into more challenging things. 

Real life gospel clarity 

As religious people we so often go through the routines of christian stuff without much clarity or consideration of what it is that God is actually offering us. That is the overwhelming reality for most of the people in our community. Religion has been here for a couple generations now which in most cases has resulted in a lot of empty routine & structure. 

Over the last few months we have gotten to spend some regular time with some extended family of one of the guys in the church. Other denominations have “laid claim” on that family’s area, but the little group of 4 or 5 people have been open to a few of us from the church coming to talk through some things in God’s word. 

We spent the first few times together clarifying that only Jesus can save us and it’s only by faith in Him that we are brought back into right standing with God. We then took time considering who God is as our good Father and His good design for us to live life with Him. Now we are working through the realities of our lives today as the Spirit works to reveal our hearts and offers true life with Him … yet our flesh hates anything the Spirit desires, and Satan is actively crafting a world system & lies to entice us away from life with God. 

The clarity from God’s word that we’re getting to grow in together really does offer a stable foundation for us to stand on. We face all kinds of opposition in our lives each day … much of that opposition from within our own hearts & minds. But there is new and meaningful life being offered in the midst of all the struggle and opposition. 

We are trusting God for this door to stay open to keep spending time with our brothers & sisters in that small community. Up until now those other denominations have not pushed back too much on us visiting there. In our years here, the individual conversations have typically gone great, but when big-religion feels like their territory is being touched, lots of words get said and major pressure is put on people to distance themselves from us. 

Keep Praying

Pray that as a church we would grow more in our love for each other; seeing each other the way Jesus sees us. There are hard conversations that need to be had; forgiveness that needs to be chosen; sacrificial choices that need to be made. 

Pray for our marriages. That us husbands would walk with the Spirit in loving our wives and boldly speaking the truth as we strive to live together with God. And that wives (even those without believing husbands) would humbly respond to the Spirit as He reveals, speaks, and leads. 

Pray for us parents. We need so much help, wisdom, and stamina. Some fleshly patterns of raising kids are creating immense struggles & pain for some families within the church. 

Pray for some key individuals in the church who are choosing to live in some old fleshly patterns. They are trying to escape some hard circumstances in their families, they’re holding grudges, they’re finding lots of excuses to be distant, and they’re not responding well yet to truth at the moment.