Rick and Cheryl on Adventure

  CHOOSING PATHS I instruct you in the way of wisdom and lead you along straight paths. (Proverbs 4:11) If you view a map of our 10-acre property, it’s more than a little confusing. There’s a paved parking lot at the base of a rough road which zigzags up the mountainside, carving our land into three separate parcels. The parking space and road easements are actually cut out of our private land, but we own the terrain surrounding them. We quickly learned that the road is gazetted and appears on Google maps, so anyone can use it. It serves as an access road for Telus vehicles as there is a telecommunications tower above us. The parking lot was built and paved because it is such a popular hiking trail that vehicles were lining the road and impeding passage. We counted a group of 14 hikers one day If you know where you’re going when you climb the trail, it eventually leads to an amazing geological formation called the Keremeos Columns. There’s a small provincial park up there as we...

FOUNDATIONS   He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the Lord is the key to this treasure (Isaiah 33:6).   We were at the beginning of week #4 of our sojourn in the Similkameen, and it didn’t look like we’d accomplished much. Passersby glancing up at our lot from Pincushion Trail would have considered it vacant. BUT that’s because Rick had been laboring on the cottage foundation, and you usually can’t see foundations. Foundations underlay everything that you CAN see later, both with buildings and with lives.  I’ve been receiving an education in construction as I hold the ends of boards, read the bubble in the level, and watch cement scٰhlop out of the mixer. And wow – there are a multitude of finicky but necessary steps involved in laying a solid and dependable foundation. For those who haven’t been witness to the process, here’s a quick summary with illustrative photos:  1) Create a piece of fl...

  A THIN PLACE "Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place?" (Psalm 24:3) Development is progressing slowly but steadily here on Pincushion, accompanied by a similarly slow and steady drain on our bank account. While Rick’s wheelhouse is sequencing consultations with contractors, foundation preparation, cement pouring, and sewer system planning, my sojourn here may be more of a spiritual one. My thin place I’m sure many of you have heard of the concept of “thin places” I can’t remember exactly when I first came across it – probably at our Regina church when learning more about contemplative prayer. A short time later, I encountered the term while visiting the isle of Iona off the coast of Scotland, learning that Iona is considered one of the world’s best known thin places. It is described as the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland, site of a Benedictine Abbey and Augustinian nunnery where monks and nuns lived, worked and worshipped for three a...

Welcome, family and friends, to a reinstatement of our blog. Previous entries detailed our experiences in international development work which has been suspended for now as we lean into a new adventure! PINCUSHION PROVIDENCE "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him." (I Corinthians 2:9) One might wonder why Rick and Cheryl, Prairie born and bred, staunch Saskatchewan supporters, find themselves defecting to British Columbia at this stage in their retirement years. Well, sitting here in a borrowed trailer at the foot of a mountain, sometimes sweating, sometimes buffeted by spasmodic wind gusts, sometimes gazing out at a star-filled sky, we ourselves have plenty of time to ponder what we are doing here. Literally and figuratively.  It didn't happen overnight, but once the game was put in play a year ago, the dominoes have fallen rather quickly! It's one of those things that began with the sharing of a drea...

Trying Times Our last weeks in Honduras are not what we had expected. Since returning from Guatemala, we have been involved in work of the ministry with the intention to return to Canada on April 2nd. That plan has been scuttled. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to gain momentum, this post is being written under an isolation curfew and uncertainty about how long we will be forced to stay here. More on that at the end of the post. One of the events we had wanted to  experience while here is the m onthly meeting that Pastor Victor holds for all of the K-6 sponsored families. It is an opportunity for SOH staff to encourage them and see how they are doing. The whole family comes out to one of the schools and Pastor Victor opens with a devotional. Then letters and gifts from sponsors are handed out and any pictures that need to be taken for sponsors are snapped. Since sponsorship funds are able to provide a small food hamper for the family each month, next was the grouping of fam...

Every day is a good day with Hector and Ruth Ruth preparing Spanish rice for 26 Hector receiving a gift from a family which he re-gifted later in the day  Hector and Ruth Aragon have been serving in Guatemala for 21 years and administer one of the child sponsorship programs under Child Care Plus (CCP) that several of our global worker colleagues operate around the LAC region. We were invited to visit the Aragons and experience their ministry first-hand so that Rick could review the operations and provide some organizational advice. We spent 8 days with them, hosted in their home, which is also where Canadian ministry teams come for short term work deployments.  Little by little, over twenty years, Hector and Ruth have expanded their home and team lodgings on their property to accommodate teams as large as 16.  Between the team building and the extra rooms in the main house, they have 12 bathrooms! Back yard of he Aragon home. Just out of sight at the top o...

Back to School in Honduras Who needs 120 bottles of glue, 450 notebooks, 80 dictionaries, 560 pencils, 160 erasers and 120 sharpeners to start the school year?  School in these parts starts the beginning of February and the Schools of Hope (SOH) team here in Tegucigalpa are busy making sure their sponsored students will be fully equipped to resume their education after a 10-week break. Cheryl and I arrived in Honduras on January 9th and will be working with the team here for almost three months. This is our second time in Teguc, as we spent 7 weeks here back in November 2016.   The Capital of Honduras -Tegucigalpa One facet of this ministry is child sponsorship through ERDO, which is the development arm of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC).  More than 270 students are sponsored by Canadians through monthly donations that cover costs like school fees, uniforms and school supplies. 1 39 sponsored students attend grades 2-6 at three elementary schools in...