Sunday Nights

Last night Cliff and I spend many hours with a couple from our church. It was fantastic! Spending an evening with a married couple, talking about pretty much everything, was so good for us. It was  exactly what we needed. I"m so excited for Sunday nights now, getting to hang out with friends that are married and understand whats going on every week will be great!

Our Support Letter

I Chronicles 16:23-34 "Sing to the Lord, all the earth; proclaim His salvation day after day, Declare His glory among the nations, His marvelous deeds among all peoples."

Dear friends and family,

We are so excited to be sharing some amazing news with you! We have been offered an opportunity to spend a year serving in a mission’s field in the Philippines. We’ll be living with Rae’s grandparents, Lloyd and Edith Baker, who have been missionaries to the Philippines for 50+ years, and we’ll be working alongside them in their church, Marikina Valley Bible Baptist Church. We’re really excited about this; we know that this will be a great growing experience for us. In addition to being able to see the inner workings of both a church and missionary’s lives, living with a couple who has been married for well over 50 years will be pretty awesome!

What we’ll be doing

·         Cliff will help with the preaching and teaching

·         Rae will be deeply involved in the music ministry & choir

·         We’ll both be working in the visitation ministry, bible studies, prayer walks in the city, and church outreach.

·         Rae will be documenting our time there with her camera, and we’ll both be posting on our blog and keeping everyone informed with regular email updates.

Prayer requests

·        Raise enough support to cover our expenses to travel to Manila, and while we are there

·        We will be used effectively in Manila

·        Stay safe in a dangerous city

Partner with us

 We’d like to ask you, as our family, friends, and the people that care about us most, to help us with two very important factors to our being able to spend this year abroad. The first is that you would cover this trip in prayer. Only God’s blessing on this will make it the incredible trip it can be.

The second way you can partner with us is by supporting us monetarily. We were not approved for a work visa, so while we’re there, we will not have any income. My grandparents have rearranged their budget to accommodate providing for our living with them (extra utilities, fuel, and most of the extra food costs) but we still have student loan bills that come every month, and other living expenses. Making all the cuts we can, we still need $350 every month. We trust that God will provide these funds for us. So we’re asking that you will pray with us and consider helping us with our monthly expenses by sending us support.    

         

How To Help:

If you would like to help support us every month, or with a onetime gift we would be most grateful! You can send the support directly to our sending church, South Side Baptist Church.

Cliff and Rae Rosenow

c/o South Side Baptist Church

465 S. Grant Ave

Springfield MO, 65806    

please make checks payable to Cliff Rosenow 

or by Paypal

Help Support Us!

Whether you chose to support us financially or by prayer, we ask that you share this with your friends and contacts. You never know who God may be willing to use to further His kingdom.

Let us know if you would like to get our email updates!
Thank you so much!

Getting Ready

We've been busy getting ready for our trip the past few weeks. We've sent out our support letter, and now we're contacting churches. We've also put some more stuff in storage, and we're getting more boxes packed every week. Who knew two people could have so much stuff?! We've also been talking to my grandparents several times a week, planning our trip and of course the want to get to know Cliff. We got Tagalog CDs, and some books about the Philippines so we can study up before we leave.
It seems like all we've been talking about it is our trip, so we had a lovely day at the park a couple of weeks ago, just to try to get away from the stress for a few hours. It was so good to just be together for a while.

Our View

It has come to my attention that some of what I say here has upset some people. It's not meant to be that way at all. When Cliff and I started this site, it was to keep people informed on what's going on in our lives, what we're thinking, and our point of view. It's especially easier for me to write what I want to say, than to speak it out loud. Ask Cliff, I hate confrontation. HATE it. The first time he's seen me stand up to someone was last Friday. Seriously, it took that long. But I can say what I truly feel here. I've always been able to use blogs for that, I've had several over many years.

Of course the problem with that is on here I'm "safe" so I can speak exactly what I feel, believe, think, and see. I can be totally honest. The problem with honesty is everyone wants it, till it's turned on them. No one really wants an honest view of themselves (myself included). I've been careful to not use names, and to be as generic as possible when referring to other people. And maybe that's not the best, because then everyone who reads it thinks its about them, but on the other hand, it would be rude and possibly cruel to specifically name someone and call them out so publicly.

So I will simply try to word things more carefully, and be more precise when needed.

Passport Photos

We went and got our passport photos today! Now we're just waiting on a couple more documents to get here, and then we can send off for our passports :) It'll be a tight squeeze, but I'm pretty sure we'll get them back before we leave. It's super exciting!

Calling Out The Church

Cliff and I would like to start meeting with a married couple. Actually, what we'd really like is marriage counseling. We had a couple of pre-marital counseling sessions before we got married. But we barely scratched the surface of the basics of what we need to talk about.

We've read books, and discussed them together. We pray together, and have devos together. But it's not enough. We need fellowship with married couples, we need to be able to talk about things we're going through now. We need post-marital counseling, and discipleship. We're newly married, we have problems just like everyone. We're planning to move to a foreign country. We have a lot on our plate right now. We need good, godly counsel and fellowship. But we're not getting it. There have been a couple of times we've gotten to spend an evening with our Sunday school class leaders, and it's been great. But we need that kind of fellowship more than once every few months.

The church is supposed to provide fellowship, discipleship, and godly counsel. We're supposed to be getting the help, support, and encouragement our marriage needs from our church. We are young and inexperienced when it comes to relationships. We haven't seen very many solid godly marriages, the kind of marriage we desire so much.

I'm calling out the church on this. The church was designed by God to be a place of encouragement and support. But it isn't for us. We come to church, we go to bible studies, we are involved in many different ministries. And we love it. But we need to be ministered to as well. There is no married or couples class right now, so we have no where to turn. We signed up for discipleship in July, but there still hasn't been anyone paired with us.

It's not supposed to be like this. We want so badly to have a strong marriage, but we don't have any idea of how to build that. We need guidance and help. The church should be that for us.

I'm calling our church out. It's not functioning as God intended. And it needs to be fixed.

Life As Usual

It might seem like all we think about is our trip... Which is kinda true. We do talk about it a lot, and spend a lot of time planning for it. But we have a normal life too. We go grocery shopping, and go to movies once in a while. We watch tv sometimes, and cook supper together every night. Cliff plays video games, and I paint my nails. We workout, and we go to the park.

We're normal. We're happily married. We have a life. We just happen to be planning a life changing move to a tropical island. It's all normal here. ;)

Even If We Die

Several people in our lives don't like that we're planning on going overseas. They are concerned for our safety. We know that there are a lot of ministry opportunities in the US, but we feel that for now God is telling us to go to the Philippines. We know it's dangerous, we know we could be kidnapped or killed. Sex trafficking is very prevalent there, I know that there's a very real chance I could be kidnapped. But none of that is going to make us not go. 

God never promises that we'll be safe, or that everything will be OK, or that we will even see the worth in following Him in this lifetime. He does promise though, that it is worth it, that following His will is what we were created for, it's what we need to do. And He will bless us for doing His will, even when it eems everyone we love is against us. 

We've thought about this, and prayed and sought counsel from others who have been there. We know exactly what we're getting into. And we still believe that this mission is what God has for us right now. 

I'm sorry that they are so worried, I wish they could trust that we have thought about it and weighed the risks and still want to go. Even if we die there, it will be worth it to us. I wish they could understand this. 

To us, being a Christian is not going to church and reading the bible. Being a Christian is following Christ where He leads no matter what. Because only God saves, only God moves in our lives, only God heals, only God is worth dying for. 

So even if it means we die there, we're still going. 

Trusting

With our upcoming trip to Manila, we've been talking about all kinds of stuff. The one subject that has come up most, not at all surprisingly, is money. Our budget is not quite 'tight' right now. We have enough to live on, reasonably comfortably, pay all our bills, and save a small amount every month. It's OK, and if we were staying here it would be just fine. But since we're going to another country where we can't work for a year, it's suddenly much more important that we save all we can to cover our expenses while we're there.

We're trying to cut out unnecessary expenses... Like the sonic shakes we love, and eating out several times a month. Taking drives just for the fun of it, or buying new clothes. We're also trying to cut down on grocery expenses. Cliff is having a hard time with the "meat only 3-4 times a week" while I'm having trouble with the "dessert limited to 2-3 times a week."  We've always liked discount and second-hand shops but now even more. I've been cutting coupons, and trying to use things we already have instead of getting something different or new.

So far, God has already provided just enough money to get to Manila. We have the money for plane tickets, ad our visa's. That's all. We're going to need at least $200 every month while we're there to cover student loans and living expenses.Maybe as much as $250. We're trying to save enough to cover everything. But we've already decided that if we don't have enough support before we leave we're going anyway. We both feel like God is saying "I gave you enough to go, so now go and trust Me with what's left."

We're hoping to be able to raise support to cover whatever we can't save between now and when we leave. So we're working on writing support letters, and designing business cards to hand out. But no matter what happens, no matter how much we save or raise, we're going. Because we know that God will provide for us.