March 24

AZ Canyon

Dear Friends,

Communicating the gospel to third grade Navajos can be a challenge.  As I have worked with my students this year, I have seen that the spirit world is something they are familiar with but not in a Biblical sense.  They are familiar with spirits.  They talk about skinwalkers and who has seen one.  (My 6^th graders were talking about skinwalkers this week also. When the only Anglo kid in the class said they were not real, one turned on him in fury and said, “You can’t know about it. You have not lived on the Reservation!”)  

They have a great reverence for nature and believe everything has a spirit.  In class we talk about God being a Spirit who is everywhere.  Steeped in the traditional pantheistic beliefs. they are taught that everything is God.  They have a hard time seeing the difference between ‘everything is God’ and that ‘God is a Spirit who is everywhere.'  Their understanding of the spiritual world is a world that is dark and dangerous.  Their world does not include a personal God who cares about them. 

Prayer Circle at Revival

The concept of the Trinity is one that is even difficult for kids growing up in evangelical families to grasp.  We realize we cannot understand everything about God, but my little friends are trying to understand this concept that is so foreign to them and far from what they have been taught by their families.  I talk about Jesus as God the Son.  They think of Jesus as god the sun.  I heard that this past week.  I talk about the Holy Spirit.  They think of evil spirits doing bad things. (And my older students pray in a superstitious way – asking God to make the day go slowly because they really want it to go quickly. Somehow, they don’t want to jinx it.)

 

Fellowship and Food

The students struggle with understanding the personal God of the Bible.  They wonder if He actually exists.  They can see the world around them, but they cannot see God.  This last week we talked about how we know there is a God.  We reviewed Systematic Theology 101 that God reveals himself through creation, His Word, and His Son.  This week we will study heaven and hell.  Several of the students are very flippant about the fact they are going to hell.  I do not want to scare them, but I want them to see the Biblical truth of the afterlife. 

Cool Kids

Please pray for me to have great wisdom in how to communicate effectively these Biblical truths to my students.  Please pray for one student who has been most vocal about going to hell, yet I can see that he is really thinking about this.  Pray that he will decide to follow Jesus.

Hiking

(The older students went to a two-day revival. I have not heard yet how that went and if any of the students have made decisions for Christ (most of them have not).

Love to you all,

P.S. Today I had on my lesson plan to teach about hell. Well, I had only 30% of my class here. The enemy does not want them to hear this lesson. Pray for the class as I teach them Biblical truth about hell tomorrow.

March 17

Dear Friends and Family,

Dodger Fan

 Roger was eager to see his Dodgers play on their spring training field, so we “played hooky” on Saturday. It was a pleasant day of relaxation. I overheard a young man sitting behind us telling the family next to us how he had gotten in. He didn’t know that the game was a sellout, so he waltzed up to the ticket window and asked for a seat on the lawn. The cashier told him it was a sell out, but it was his lucky day! The man right before him had left a ticket at the window for the next person who asked! Take the gift, my friend, and tell the story.

Speaking of free. Contributions have been down this winter, so SVIS has paid its bills, but the paychecks have been held up until there are funds. Three of us teachers had already scheduled a trip to Pizza Hut to celebrate our readers Book-It accomplishments (reading incentives that rewards the kids who read with a pan pizza), but the other two single gals live basically from paycheck to paycheck and are paying off school loans. They were wondering what they were going to cut back on in order to do this field trip. Well, a mistake was made in the kitchen, so our pizza had to be remade, and it was complimentary! We were so excited about the Lord’s provision. (I went ahead and laid down a tip for the poor harried waitress.)

I found a cute art project on line – making snakes out of TP rolls, but when Roger asked one of his boys, he was told that drawing snakes was not done by the Navajo. There are some sand paintings with snakes in them, but on the Internet I found 25 taboos for snakes. So, I guess we’ll think of some other art project for those rolls—maybe saguaro cacti or armbands.

Here’s something else: One of my girls mentioned she had been thrown in the snow, so I looked it up. In the Navajo way, you roll a baby (naked) in his first snow so that he can grow strong and healthy. You roll him towards the east, because the sun rises from the east.

Also, another of my girls said she didn’t want to be the first to make her little niece laugh. I learned another tradition: The first laugh of a Navajo child is a very significant event. It marks the child’s final passing from the spirit world to the physical world, meaning he or she is now fully human and present with us. This milestone warrants a party, and what a party it is!

The honor of throwing this party, including covering the expenses, falls to the person who made the child laugh first—a parent or someone else. That person takes charge of butchering sheep, preparing food, gathering rock salt, putting candy and gifts into bags, and inviting friends from near and far.

Once a baby has laughed, training in generosity begins immediately—a value held in high regard among the people. At the party, where the baby is considered the host, the parents or person responsible for the first laugh help hold the baby’s hand as he or she ceremonially gives the rock salt, food, and gifts to each guest (Mark, Charles. "A Laughing Party.)

Those were just some interesting cultural lessons. The “drama” continues in the school, but things have settled down with my girls who have been in the news recently. Thank you for your prayers.

March 9

Another normal week here at SVIS, which is anything but normal. The girl I mentioned last week seems to be doing fine. She apparently is in a much better mood when she is here at school where her life isn’t so crummy (parents with other people and no real home to go to and many frustrations that build up inside.)  Of course, we are still praying for her to trust Jesus with her problems so she can find inward peace.

This week’s other story was written by another of my girls. It seems she was so distraught over the passing of a family member that she began cutting herself. When the dorm parents asked, then demanded, that she stop, out of her mouth came some very bad language. I wasn’t there, but it seems almost demonic to me. She later tried to run away from the campus. Of course the authorities and the mom had been called, and she was taken to a hospital. I don’t know any more than that. This was a major blow to my class, of course. They came to school the next day in opposite states of mind – some very subdued and others upset and unable to keep their own emotions in check. Pray for R* and the other girls in the dorm.

Tonto Basin

Friday our basketball team was scheduled to play in a tournament in Tonto Basin. To my Iowa friends, that’s like a Cedar Rapids trip – all done in one day. As a surprise, the administration decided at the last minute to take the whole school down to support the team. You can imagine what we teachers thought of that! Riding in the bus for 6 hours with our students…supervising them at a game they didn’t want to watch… and missing a day of academics that we had already planned! Aargh!

Well, praise the Lord, it did not go as badly as any of us had anticipated. The children were pretty much under control (because most of the teachers had them doing schoolwork on the bus on the way down). They only got wired after the dinner stop at McDonalds. And I didn’t get the expected headache I usually endure on long bus rides.

The Grandma was wearing this traditional dress.

But, that is not the best of it. A family drove from White River to see their boy play basketball. (That’s a long drive in itself.) One of my boys is the cousin of the ball player, so they share a grandmother. He saw his grandmother in the parking lot, and ran to talk to her through the car window while the other family members went into the gym. I could not leave him there unsupervised, so I stayed out in the parking lot out of ear-shot. After 20 minutes of being baked, I finally asked if I could sit in the car. It didn’t matter since they were speaking to each other in Apache. (He is one of the few Apache we have here.) But the thing that really got to me was the love that was flowing back and forth. They were touching each other and crying. He would die if he thought anyone in the class knew because he is one of my most difficult students, but what I saw was a little homesick child who loves his grandma very, very much. They almost had me crying too. And now I know better how to reach this child (who, by the way, is failing academically). He, though he would outwardly deny it, needs a home, a safe haven where he is loved unconditionally.

Thank you for praying

Flag Ceremony- A Tradition on Going Home Weekends

March 3

March 2, 2014

Dear Friends and Family,

Sheep (and goat) without a shepherd

We awoke this morning to heavy snow, though not like the snows many of you in IA and MD have been experiencing. It was just wet and heavy. Sometime during the night, the rains sogged up the fallen snow.  We enjoyed the surprise and the beauty anyway. Later this afternoon, one of the young guys wanted to cook a recipe from his new Indian (in Asia) cookbook (Remember many don’t have kitchens because we eat in the dining hall.), so we enjoyed lamb curry with him and some friends. What a treat! Anyway, lamb became the segue for what I had intended to write about all along.

Earlier this week I was reading in Mark 6 the familiar story of Jesus feeding the 4,000. Notice how Jesus had compassion on the multitudes because they were like  sheep without a shepherd. Jesus’ compassion was noted by the disciples, but they didn’t understand at that time that they were Jesus’ hands and feet. He said, “You feed them.” (37) Huh, what?! Yes, feed the hungry, tired, seeking crowd with what you have. (38) And as our example, Jesus was generous with his healing touch. (56)

We are challenged to be shepherds to these children every day. Each person on the staff has one specific child to mentor. My child is already a joyous Christian who seems eager to learn and please Jesus. I also acquired another child last week,  because the entire staff cannot always be in chapel, and M* will not call herself a Christian because she admits there are still things in her life that she wants to cling to -- like a sheep yearning to roll around in the dirt instead of following the Good Shepherd. The school year is almost ¾ over, and we feel strongly that we must be diligent to bring in the sheep.

We love you all,

Fresh eggs anyone?

At the Petrified Forest