April 27

A room with a view

Yes, it’s been awhile. We had a pleasant break for Easter. Because we are teachers and can’t help ourselves, we did spend some time in our classrooms, but it wasn’t as frantic as usual. We journeyed down Hwy 40 to spend a day in Winslow. If you have a chance to tour La Posada Inn, take it. We were given an informative tour by a Harvey Girl and had a fine dining experience at the Turquoise Room.

Our Easter Sunday was capped off by the baptism of four believers at our church. I always celebrate every Palm Sunday as the commemoration day of my rebirth. How wonderful it is for these people to have each Easter Sunday as a reminder of their public commitment to Christ! And another delightful tidbit: one of the dorm dads, who is a committed Christian but had not ever been baptized, was baptized in the Pacific Ocean over the break! Since we have (unofficially) adopted the young people here, we are happy ‘parents.’

Sweet girls.

Coming back after a week at home, the students reported all kinds of violence, murder, and mayhem that had occurred. This past week carried its own stresses. One of R’s boys spent time with the principal for fighting. And one of my girls was sent home for bringing contraband. The unfortunate thing was that other students’ actions precipitated the misbehavior that culminated in the reaction that received the consequence. (I’m not sure that all made sense.) Needless to say, things have been tense in both of our classrooms due to student conflicts.

We had four Spiritual Emphasis Days too—Tuesday:hand-washing, Wednesday: cross carrying, Thursday: nailing burdens to the cross, and Friday: the coming of the Holy Spirit. They didn’t understand the metaphor of carrying a cross, and my girls declared that they wouldn’t give up things (such as family, friends, or possessions) for Christ. But they seemed to take the nailing the burdens to the cross session very seriously. That is where they are. They carry so many burdens in their young lives. In fact, V* in R’s class declares he can’t trust God because he doesn’t see God helping his family. And S*, a fatherless child, has been calling him ‘Daddy.’

Dressing up like a fireman.

As we near the last weeks of school, we are somewhat discouraged that the children haven’t made the hoped-for academic or spiritual progress. Thank you for praying for them and for their ability to learn and retain information. Most in R’s class and two in particular in mine are in academic trouble and don’t have any motivation to turn things around. Thank you also for caring about their spiritual lives. If they are drawn even one step closer to making a commitment to Jesus, the struggle has been worth it.

New books from a librarian friend.

April 13

Lovely Sky. Wicked Wind.

 Dear Framily,

 We are feeling so out of shape. Yesterday we joined some other volunteers from our church and school to participate in Community Clean up Day at Holbrook. Even two hours of bending to pick up trash along the highway made me rubbery. I found some interesting things besides the usual cups, cans, diapers, and bottles. I found a pair of pants, a beach towel and a toy. AND a phone! It took some sleuthing, but I will be able to mail it to the owner tomorrow. The first name on the contacts list that I called made no effort to help me, but the second one stayed with me while conference-calling her husband, who eventually figured it out and put me on a conference call with the owner. Aren’t you glad that the Lord “stays on the line” until the lost is found? We cling to that promise for our children here.

A trip to the crosses.

Thanks to our librarian friend in Waldorf, we have some new books and kits for our children. We’ll take some photos when the children return from vacation. Speaking of which, we don’t have too much planned though we’ve scheduled a day trip to Winslow to tour the La Posada Hotel and maybe shop at WalMart. (Holbrook has no shopping opportunities.) We’re not sure about another day trip – maybe Canyon de Chelly.  Otherwise, we have saved up some projects for our vacation, so we’ll be plenty busy. :)

The children aren’t always eager to come home. If you could hear their stories, you’d understand why. Some receive physical abuse, and others are neglected so they do nothing all vacation but eat Ramen noodles and play video games or watch movies. They want to go home, and yet they don’t. No wonder the days before going home are so stressful.

We had four staff moms expecting last week; now we have three. A new baby was added to our campus! Such joy! Everyone is so excited.  We now have nine staff children here with their parents. Let’s pray for them this week. They are in a different cultural situation because they are neither the Native Americans nor the ones called to serve here. The younger ones don’t face racism because they are so cute, but the older one has more difficulty.

Have a wonderful Easter Season,

Love to you always,

April 6

Dear Framily,

Snow in April

Some things seem so normal, and some things so foreign. I go home in the evening, listen to iheart radio, sweep the floors, look at FaceBook, and read a novel. Then we hear about the spiritual warfare that is going on in the dorm- night terrors, self-mutilation, outrageous reactions to simple requests by the dorm parent, quarrels, etc. Also, it’s weird not to be making my own meal decisions. SVIS sticks to the rigid state standards for the school lunch program. When we went off campus to SubWay and the girl asked what to put on the sandwich, I said, “Oh, I get to choose?!” It had been so long since I’d chosen my own lunch. (We have an excellent Chef, by the way, whom we appreciate very much.)

I’ve been trying to help my students understand that the Kingdom of God is upside-down. It is not like the Anglo world, and it is not like the Navajo world. Jesus wants us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek and be content and thankful. It’s not about my rights; it’s about putting the other people first. And a special gift of clothing from a dear friend (Thanks K*) also encouraged me to share the verses we memorized this week. The kingdom of God is about our clothing – what we choose to take off, and what we put on.

Col. 3:8 Put aside anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth and (Col. 3:12) put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another, and forgiving each other … just as the Lord forgave you.”

Another student has left our school. He was 16 and in 7^th grade. I know he felt safe here, and he had made a lot of progress. He was one who had thrown a Bible across the room the first week he was here. Towards the end, he was reading his Bible and saying things weren’t so bad here. He hopefully will study for his GED. The dorm dad tried to convince him to pass the GED and join the military. Talk about hopeless. But the Holy Spirit is the One who gives hope and changes lives.

So, we have another week of school until our Easter Break. Every teacher is emphasizing Jesus’ atoning death and victorious resurrection this week. We’re praying for hearts to be changed. And, as always, we thank you for praying with us.

Kids' Club 

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