Where are the Beines?

While Kimberly painted the house, Nate painted the doghouse.  Snickerdoodle is officially an Oregon Ducks fan, as you can see.  :-)

10/03/2010

Where in the World are the Beines???  This is a question that recently reached my email inbox (which now has over 600 messages!).  Over a month and a half ago I caught a minute in transit to scribe what I thought (and still hope) would be our next newsletter.  Instead the draft sat until now (due the busyness noted below).  Since we are now being asked, I felt I should at least get a blog entry out to let you all know that we are alive and how you can pray for the busy Beines.  And hopefully this will turn into a full-fledged newsletter that will be making its way to your mailbox soon!

(On 07/15/2010, Dave wrote the following.)

This edition of the Beine Banter is being penned from the Denver airport (where I am in route to Chicago).  This is pretty much how it has been since our arrival back to the USA in mid June; busy and constantly on the run as we struggle to adjust back to the pace of life here in the USA.  As I write, I am listening to a podcast and checking my email, as three separate announcements talk over each other in the background.  What does all of this have to do with our newsletter?  Well, perhaps it explains (in part) why you haven’t heard much from us of late.  In this edition of the Banter you will hear of our life and ministry in the USA, and our developing plans to return to Nepal.  Enjoy!

Having settled back into life (and our home) in the USA, it is hard to get motivated to begin planning for our next foray back to Nepal.  Yet, with tight flight availability and other necessary long-term reservations it is imperative that we do so.  One of the first things we need to do is secure someone to teach our children next term in Nepal;  s/he doesn’t need to be a trained teacher, but someone who loves working with kids (particularly boys) who can manage our kids’ home school curriculum while in Nepal.  We are looking for just the right match for our kids.  Because of our isolation in rural Nepal we prefer some cross-cultural experience.  Please pray for us as we seek just the right match.  [Update- we now have our teacher lined up!  PTL!   We will introduce you to her in our next newsletter!]

What are we spending our time (six months) doing?  I, Dave have been teaching anthropology (two sections), introduction to linguistics and cross-cultural communication at Moody Bible Institute, Spokane.  The latter two of these courses are new at this school, so I have been writing the curriculum as I go along (which is very time consuming).  My goal in teaching at Moody is 1) to infect students with the mission bug (you know how we have been reporting the desperate need for more workers for the harvest) and 2) to equip them for missions (thus the topics I teach).  I have been very encouraged to see a sincere interest among many of my students, who appear very open to serving God in the mission field in general, and with Wycliffe Bible Translators in particular.  Since Moody is an approved training ground for Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International (Wycliffe’s sister organization), Wycliffe and SIL support our involvement on the Moody Spokane faculty.

This week in church a new follower of the Beines reminded me that although they know us, they don’t know much about Wycliffe and SIL.  In short, the vision of Wycliffe Bible Translators (the mission organization I have been with for twenty three years; and Kimberly has also been a member since our marriage 18 years ago) is to make God’s word accessible to all people in the language of their heart.  And the vision of SIL International (a sister organization to Wycliffe that I have also been a member of for the same length of time) is to “serve language communities worldwide, building their capacity for sustainable language development, by means of research, translation, training and materials development.”  So, we work for Wycliffe as our sending mission and we serve SIL International through our literacy and Scripture-use work in South Asia and through my posting with SIL as an International Anthropology Consultant.  For more information about Wycliffe and SIL International see www.Wycliife.org and www.sil.org respectively.  

Along with teaching, we continue our partnership in the Chepang literacy and Scripture-use project (Nepal) remotely from Spokane and I continue my assignment with SIL as an Anthropology Consultant.  My personal goal in serving as an International Anthropology Consultant is to use my vocation to further the Gospel by serving Wycliffe, SIL, and other organizations that are endeavoring to reach the ends of the earth.  Besides teaching at Moody and serving my own organizations I have also had the opportunity to work with Western Seminary (Portland, Oregon) teaching an applied linguistics course to future missionaries, with Prairie Bible Institute (Canada) encouraging their community development program, with Mission Aviation Fellowship providing cultural orientation to their new missionaries, with several local churches educating about missions, and finally, teaching at a regional missions conference, since landing back in Spokane.  Again, the wider goal being the promotion of (and quipping for) world missions more broadly.  On top of all of this we continue our local involvement with Bhutanese refugees here in Spokane (which is one of the main reasons we feel compelled to continue to split each year between Spokane and Nepal).      

Meantime, Kimberly has been holding down the fort at home.  Besides keeping us all dressed, fed, etc., she has been searching for new part-time work (to keep her medical license active).  And on top of that she even managed to oversee the re-carpeting of the upstairs of our house, and she re-painted the entire upstairs of our house herself!  Beyond this Kimberly has been spending significant time navigating the public school system here and trying to mesh that with (and find) a more appropriate home school curriculum for our time in Nepal.  Please pray for just the right solution.

There is one more thing that we have recently been doing for which we covet your prayers.  We recently began the “home study” process in preparation to seek adoption of one or two Nepali girls next year when we are back in Nepal.  Although time consuming, we feel God has led us to begin this adoption process.  In Nepal, girls are not favored and twins are considered a bad omen, so if twin girls are abandoned, they might be left to die, or they might be split up and adopted out to separate families.  We feel very open to the idea of adopting twin girls (or any girl/s) if God brings the opportunity during this next year while we are in Nepal.   Currently we are told that Nepal is “closed” to foreign adoptions (you might remember our dead-end experience with Baby Girl Tamang last year) so it would have to be an act of God to make this happen.  But we have felt compelled to prepare for the opportunity should it arise (which would not be very likely-humanly speaking); and we plan to drop our portfolio with the government adoption office upon our arrival to Nepal next winter and we’ll wait to see what happens.  Please join us in praying for 1) the timely completion of the home study process (we have just enough time--with no snags-- to complete this before we depart),  2) for the availability of twin girls if it is God’s desire for us, and 3) for the opportunity for a foreign adoption from Nepal against high odds.    

On a personal note, although we sincerely enjoy the various “hats” we have been wearing (and have felt led by God to put them on) and have felt led to pursue the various other opportunities we have mentioned above, all of these things have had us much busier than we would like.  So, please pray that God would give us the strength to carry out the various things God has for us to do.  We cannot do it alone!  And we would appreciate your prayers.

(back to 10/03/10)

So, that’s what the Beines have been up to.  Thanks for your continued prayer for us (although we have not been very good at keeping you up-to-date).  Sorry that it has been so long since you have heard from us!  And stay tuned for more in newsletter form soon!

The Beines