Home again (kind of)!

    At long last we are resurrecting our blog site! We have been keeping one since our missions adventures began over 10 years ago and we still find it is the best and easiest way to chronicle our lives and ministry. We will still send an occasional update through email whenever we have happenings that are not appropriated for public social media.

     As many of you may remember from our last email update, we finished our 9 month stint in the Middle East with 3 months in the nation of Jordan. Our trip came to an end at the beginning of December and it was bittersweet to leave, so many new friendships, a new culture that was just beginning to feel like home. But at the same time, having resided in so many new countries in so short a time, we are definitely happy to be back in someplace familiar again.

 

     The last month and a half has been a time of rest and recovery. We returned to the US very tired and burned out from so much change in such a short amount of time. We were able to spend a week with Douglas family in Texas. My brother and his wife just had a baby and it was wonderful to meet him and spend some time with all the cousins. From there we flew back to Portland and have been with Karen’s parents enjoying the quiet and the wild winter weather. We will be here in the Portland area for the next 6 weeks and then we will head south to California in early March and finally back to Costa Rica a few weeks later. We are enjoying our time here in the US but are anxious to get back to our Latin American home.  

  

    We as a family want to give a huge thank you to our community here in the US and abroad that supported us in prayer and with finances during our stint in the Middle East. We had expected it to be a difficult and heavy time emotionally and physically but instead we felt like we were covered with a special protection. It was such a wonderful time of receiving from the Lord and we cannot thank you all enough for you support during this time. We will be returning to Costa Rica with many new ministry tools and a renewed vision for sending Latinos and we have you all to thank for making this last year possible. 

We though it appropriate to end this post with selection of photos from out whole trip. Many thanks and blessings to you all. 

Douglas, Karen, Gabriel and Zachariah

Amsterdam

Beirut Lebanon

Enjoying the Mediterranean

Food Distribution

Tyre

Egypt

Sailing on theNile

Egyptian Foods!

Amman, Jordan

Petra

New Friends

Coke is EVERYWHERE

 Thank you all again for your prayers and support over these last 9 months. 

Many blessings, 

Douglas, Karen, Gabriel and Zachariah

Lebanon Update

Greetings from Lebanon! We will be sending out our updates via email for the next 6 months until we get back to the US. If you want to keep up with our travels please join our mailing list by clicking on the "Join Our Mailing List" link above.

Blessings,

Douglas, Karen and the boys

On to Europe

Hey all! Our journey has officially begun. After a whirlwind exit from Costa Rica we spent a wonderful week with my family in Houston Texas. It was over way too fast bit we are excited for our next leg of the journey.

We are currently at the Houston airport waiting for our flight to Amsterdam where we will spend a week with friends and then from there on to our next destination.

We will post when possible but have no idea when and where we might get internet access.

Pray that our bags arrive with us and that we have a smooth flight.

Blessings,

Douglas, Karen and the boys.

Almost there!

Hello Friends and Family,

We are so excited to give you a quick update on the progress of our fast approaching trip. Just over a month ago our airline had a great deal on tickets and with the help of some friends were able to purchase the tickets but we are still needing to raise the funds to cover most of the cost. We have also had a lot of extra expenses as we prepare for our trip so if you would like to help us with some of these costs it would be a great blessing and encouragement.

It is crazy to think that we leave for Houston in less than two weeks. We will spend a week there with Douglas' family and then head on to Amsterdam for a conference and from there on to other locations. We posted more details in our last blog post so if you want you can read there.

We have rented a storage unit to store our belongings here in Costa Rica. It is nice and not to far from our house. We have already started moving items but the big move will be this coming Friday/Saturday. We are still praying about our van, whether we should loan it to someone while we are gone or just store it.

Please be praying for our family as we say good by, some of our friends will not be here when we get back and that has been very hard already. Pray for the boys as we travel around a lot this next year and for their home schooling that we will continue to stay on task. Pray for our packing process that we will not stress out too much and will be able to get everything done on time. Pray also for all of the tasks that have to be done as we tie up loose ends here in Costa Rica. A big answer to prayer, we had a family offer to take care of our dog, Sparky, while we are gone. The boys are so happy!

Also so you all know we will be more discrete in our communication, using email more and putting less on the blog/facebook.

Thanks for all your prayer and support. God has already shown himself to be so faithful in this whole process. We will see you all in December!

D&K

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As we take a minute to look back over last year and look forward to this new year in front of us, we are so thankful for Gods continued direction for us as a family and for us in our ministry. 

Most of you know about two years ago we started home schooling the boys knowing that God was calling us to be more mobile. That has been such an amazing blessing as we have been able to travel as a family. Back in April last year many of you will remember that  we were able to travel through Central America. Then just a few months later we had a visit to the States where we got to see many of you and make connections. It was a great visit but too short as we missed seeing so many people we would have loved to see. (That's why we are planning a much longer visit at the end of this year, but more about that later.) And most recently as you hopefully saw in our last few posts we got to travel to Nicaragua for some meetings that were held to bring all the bases in Central America together. It was so amazing to go and feel like we were among family. We knew people from every location and felt so at home with them. Douglas was also able to meet with a group of them that are interested specifically in unreached people groups like we are.  Karen took Zachariah and headed to Honduras where she had an amazing time teaching and ministering to the staff and students of the base in Siguatepeque. In all of these times home schooling has been a blessing as we could all go together but at the same time these last few months have been so busy that is has been a challenge. 

If you look back at our post from October we listed some of the events that kept us possibly busier then we have ever been; including Douglas teaching in D.C., Karen hosting Thanksgiving for about 165 people,
 








 






She was also in charge of Christmas decorating and Christmas dinner at the base.




 











 

We had a National YWAM retreat where Karen got the pleasure of baptizing a girl she has been disciplining,

  
And during all of this craziness we had some of our favorite people come for visits including a last minute visit from Karen's best friend from childhood, Holly. It was so great to see familiar faces from home.





 To top it all off our car ended up in the shop for about 6 weeks! But we kept pressing on and with God's faithfulness made it through to another Bible school graduation followed by a short break for Christmas and New Years.
As we have shared before we are very excited for what God has laid on our hearts for this next year. Starting in just a few weeks we will lead and participate in an Islamic studies seminar at the base here. Then in March we will be taking a big leap of faith and traveling to another part of the globe where they have not heard the Gospel as openly as we have. We will take a course on reaching unreached peoples and then travel to different locations with the purpose of making contacts, living in the culture and seeing what God is doing first hand. In all we will be there for about 81/2 months hopefully with a week long stop in Holland at the beginning of the trip for a YWAM conference and a quick visit with some good friends. After the 8+ months comes to an end we plan to head to the States for about three months to see all of you. Then back to Coast Rica to hopefully use all of our new found knowledge to raise up and send out Latinos into those areas where people so desperately need the Gospel.  

We have already started sorting through our house and are beginning to pack up as we know the next couple months are going to pass quickly. We are also needing to buy tickets soon and as we look at the cost of the trip  we are hoping that once we are there our current monthly support will be enough to sustain us but the major extra cost of course will be travel. We will most likely be looking at several different tickets, One from Costa Rica to Houston then Houston to Europe with a stop over then continuing on to the destination of the course we will be attending. After that we will hopefully be traveling between three to four different countries. Then we would head back to Houston, then on to Portland and home to Costa Rica again a few months later. Of course we won't need all the travel money before we leave just enough for the first leg of the trip which we believe will be around $1500 each person. This includes one way tickets to Houston then our round trip tickets from Houston to Europe/ME and back again. We have found some great deals, but know we need to book soon. 

Please be praying with us as we prepare both in the physical packing etc., and spiritually as well. Please pray against anxiety and stress for all of us and that we will continue to trust in the Lord as we  move forward.

Many blessings in this New Year,

Karen, Douglas, Gabriel and Zachariah

FM Meetings

We had a great day today meeting with a number of other Central American leaders praying for the almost 2 billion people that have never had the chance to heard the good new about Jesus. It is a huge job but God is doing great things around the world. We are excited to be a part of it.

We heard testimony today from each of our Central American bases and one of the most exciting things we heard is that many of our CA churches are beginning to catch a vision for sending their own people our to the nations. Even since we came here eight years ago we have seen a chance and many Latin American are seeing missions not as the work.of a few white people from Europe or America but as something that belongs to everyone regardless of race.

From our own area we have several couples that are preparing themselves to go and it had an opportunity today to pray for them and heard their stories. It will be exciting to see how their stories unfold.

I head back to Costa Rica tomorrow with Gabriel, we have a bus that heads out at 7 am. Karen headed north this morning with Zachariah. She is going to be teaching this week in the YWAM base is Honduras. We ask for your prayers for our travels that we will have no trouble at the borders or on the road.

Blessings from Nicaragua,

Douglas and Gabriel.

Celebration and Transformation

We had a great time last night celebrating God's faithfulness here in Nicaragua. 25 year ago in the midst of the Nicaraguan civil war a brave young couple with their two kids moved to Nicaragua to tell the people about Jesus and founded the first Youth With A Mission center in Nicaragua.

As we drove across the border from Costa Rica i was struck by how much the country has change even since we first moved to Central America almost eight years ago. Huge wind turbines cover the what was before abandoned fields. New crops have been planted everywhere and people have hope. Of course this is not all because of YWAM but simply because God is bringing his blessing and it is wonderful to be a part of it.

A part from the celebration we had leadership meeting all today and again tomorrow then on Tuesday we will gather with other leaders to talk and pray about unreached peoples and how we can participate in reaching them with the good news about Jesus. It is exciting to be with so many others that share a similar passion.

We will post again as we are able. Internet is very limited.

Blessings,

DKGZ

Headed to Nicaragua and Honduras

Hi all! A quick update before we head out tomorrow morning. We are headed to Nicaragua for a few day to celebrate the 25th anniversary of YWAM Nicaragua which will be followed by a couple days of regional leaders meetings and a Frontier Missions meeting.

Gabriel and Douglas, will be coming back to Costa Rica on Wednesday but Karen and Riah will continue on the Honduras so can can teach for a week in their Disipleship Training School. We are excited but also gearing up for several days on the road.

Please pray for smooth and safe travel, that the meetings would go well and that Karens ministry time in Honduras will go well.

We will try to post when we can, either here or facebook.

Blessings,

DK and family

I can not believe it is already October!

Well with our last communication we tried using a new program called Mail Chimp but since it is not working for us today we are back to our old blog which is much easier to work with.

I can not believe it is already October! It seems like yesterday was September 1st but here we are starting a new month. September is always a very busy but fun month for our family as Douglas and I celebrate our anniversary and Gabriel's birthday is this month. Also it is when the Bible school starts for Douglas and the day after our anniversary is Costa Rican independence day!

Because of the school starting and Independence day, Douglas and I decided to celebrate a weekend early this year and took a night to get away. We stayed in the city and visited a hotel we had seen but never stayed at before. It was so great. We had amazing food and the gardens at the hotel were gorgeous. We felt very blessed to have that time alone before the craziness of the next few months began. These are a few of the beautiful pictures Douglas took of the gardens at the hotel.

 This year for Gabriel's 10th birthday we decided that instead of a party with his friends that we would take one of his best friends with us and go zip lining. This is a very popular tourist thing here and the boys have been asking to go for a few years now. We had so much fun and even I, who is terrified of heights, went without having a heart attack. The scariest part was seeing two bullet aunts very close to us. Those of you who have been following us since the beginning might remember that these are huge ants that have a very, very painful bite and I have had the pleasure of being bitten twice. I think if the ant had gotten much closer I would have jumped from the platform where we where waiting around a hundred feet in the air.

The bible school is going very well. Week three starts on Monday and the students seem to be catching on very quickly. It is a super fun group of students and they even played a joke on Douglas where one student asks the correct pronunciation of the command "to die" in Spanish and as Douglas says DIE!  the whole class falls out of there chairs and hit the ground. you can check out the video on you tube using this link.       http://youtu.be/Oahu_0fZB20

They also keep posting on facebook late at night when they are all studying. Here are a few of the Pics.

 As we look forward to the next few months we are very excited and a little overwhelmed by all the events coming our way. Starting next weekend we will be attending a leadership retreat for all YWAM Costa Rica and then the very next weekend we will be traveling to Nicaragua for an all Central American leadership retreat. As Douglas and the boys head back to Costa Rica I will be continuing on to Honduras to teach in the Discipleship training school (DTS) at the YWAM base there. It will be my third time teaching at that base and I am thrilled they keep asking me back. Douglas and the staff of the Bible School will be having the Bible reading weekend before I return from Honduras and then a week later Douglas heads to D.C. to teach again in the DTS for the deaf. When he returns we will have a visit from his mom and then a week later his dad will join her to teach in the Bible school. That same week is our base 2015 planning week which usually consists of 5 straight days of meetings held off base from 9am to 4pm. Douglas will miss most of these as it is the week his dad is teaching but I will need to attend them. It will be great to have mom J. here to hang out with the boys. After that, Thanksgiving, another retreat, the end of the school and then a short break for Christmas and the New Year with the M.s.l m studies seminar and getting ready for our year of travel in the M.E.  We covet your prayers during these next months as I am having a mild panic attack just writing about it. ha ha!

Thanks again for your prayer and support. We could not be here serving with out you all.

Blessings, Douglas, Karen, Gabriel and Zachariah

A New Season

So we apologize again for taking so long for send out an update.The last few months have been pretty busy for us with our time in the States and now the last month here in Costa Rica. We don't want to skip anything good and thought that a longer update would be worth it.

Back in mid June Karen and the boys arrived in the States, and I followed a couple of weeks later. It was a great time getting to see friends and family and enjoying the long summer evenings. We were even lucky enough to make it to the annual budget bbq at Countryside Community Church. We also got to celebrate Zachariah's 8th birthday on the forth of July, go to parades, the beach, camping, hiking, canoeing, attend Karen's 20 year high school reunion and see friends we had not seen in years. It was amazing! We will soon upload a few photos of some of the highlights. Thanks so much to all of you that made our trip so special we are so blessed to have such wonderful friends and family.

Our first three weeks almost four back at home here in Costa Rica were focused on preparing for our YWAM Bases ten year anniversary celebration. Ten years ago the founders of our missions center came to Costa Rica with a team of 5 people to start Youth With A Mission San José. Ten years later we are a missions community of 60+ working in a multitude a ministries in the community and training hundreds of young people for missions. in 2005 Karen and I attended the very first Discipleship training school that our missions center ran. Gabriel was 9 months old when we arrived and learned to walk here in Costa Rica. It was during that 6 months here in Costa Rica that God confirmed for us our life call to missions and to train and send Latinos to preach the Good News to those that have never heard it.

The anniversary party was a tremendous success. There were times of celebration and dancing, times of reflections and worship and a special service for local church youth groups calling them into missions. Karen ran the logistics for the event and arranged the decorations which kept her very busy the last few weeks. All in all it was a wonderful time to thank God for what he has done and for what he will do in the next 10, 20 or 30 years. Several talented young staff at our base put together a video celebrating the last ten years of YWAM San Jose. Just click on the link below to watch it.



YWAM SJ 10th Anniversary Video

In addition to base celebrations I have been getting back into the training department with two schools running and three preparing to start in September including my fall Bible School. I have had a lot of interest in the school and it looks like we might have about 12 students most of whom are Latinos. I have a wonderful team of 4 to help me from the US and El Salvador and i am very blessed to have so much help. We will fill you in on more details as the school approaches.

While i am preparing for and leading the Bible school Karen is going to be focusing more of her time on the boys and doing most of the home schooling. She swore to me when we got married never to expect her to home school our kids but here she is. Proof that God has a sense of humor. We have been looking forward at our trip to the M.East next year and making some changes to help us be more flexible for when we will be traveling.

Thanks again for all your support and prayers. We could not fulfill the call that God has given us without all of you.

Blessings,

Douglas, Karen and the boys