We have decided on Tabitha June as her name. I never thought a name could be so difficult to find and choose.

Check Acts 9:36-39 for Tabitha’s story and June is the English way to spell the Farsi word for “dear” or “darling”.

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Hi all,

Our little baby girl was born early Monday morning, Feb 25th.  Like Tad, she was almost two weeks early.

Debra did a home water birth and for the most part it went well. The last five minutes were more like firing a torpedo but at least it was over quickly. Debra might not feel the same but she can write about it in her own post.

Tad is enjoying his new role as Big Brother and there are only small hints of “Hey, I’m not the only fish in the pond anymore….”. He is adapting well for the most part though.

Here are a few pictures of Baby Girl. As soon as we settle on a name, I’ll do another post.

Pictures

Jeff

In the recent past, I read Grace Walk by Steve McVey and found it to be an absolutely awesome book. I am a person who defaults to relating to God as judge which leads to legalism and thinking that I need to earn His forgiveness and love. Grace Walk is McVey’s transformation from a similar lifestyle of action and works into someone who walks in the Spirit and does things because they overflow from his understanding of how the Christ system works. I can’t say I was transformed in the same huge way but my default mode of relating to God certainly changed for the better.

I am currently reading another McVey book in the Grace series, Grace Rules. “Rules” in the title is a verb, not a noun. Think of a surfer yelling “You rule, dude!” It’s that kind of rule.Grace Rules focuses more on Grace vs. The Law. I just finished a chapter that uses an analogy of marriage to highlight McVey’s point. I’ll put a few of the paragraphs that jumped out at me below. Hopefully they will entice you to get the book but mainly I hope they get your mind churning and cause you to ask yourself where you live on the continuum between grace and legalism like they did me.

Trying to overcome sin by changing one’s behavior is typical of a person whose life is ruled by law. Remember that law is a system whereby someone tries to make spiritual progress or gain God’s blessings based on what he does. In a life where grace rules, victory over sin is experienced by the expression of the indwelling Christ within us. The mere absence of expressed sin is not victory. Jesus Christ within us is our victory. Until a Christian understands his union with Christ, his default setting will be a legalistic lifestyle. His whole life will revolve around rules.

The bolded sentence really hit me because I thought that the absence of sin (a particular one or many/varied ones) is the goal, the state of victory.

When a Christian gets frustrated because Jesus won’t give him a list of rules, he may turn back to Law and ask, “Will you tell me what to do?” Mr. Law is always ready to make a connection with a Christian with wandering eyes – one who looks away from Jesus. So a believer may find himself married to Mr. Grace (Jesus) and yet involved again with Mr. Law. What is it called when a person is married to one partner but involved with another? Spiritual adultery. That’s what a Christian has when he builds his life around rules. The Bible clearly teaches that we are dead to the law. We have no relationship with rules anymore. Our life is Jesus Christ. 

Wow, McVey gets right to the heart of things! 

So why do many Christians live by laws? In Colossians 2:23, Paul says it is because “these are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion….” The religionist loves rules for one simple reason – they make him look good. It’s all about appearance. A legalist enjoys the special status he holds among his peers because he seems to keep all the right rules. It is a matter of pride. 

Again, some hard-hitting truth.

Like I mentioned above, these two books have made a huge impact on my understanding of what the Christian walk is supposed to look like. McVey brings up another point regarding forgiveness but discussion of it warrants another entry here. I’ll get going on it ASAP.  All of the points McVey makes are right there in scripture, things most of us have read numerous times. I pray that we will read God’s word slowly and purposefully so as to let it sink in and stick in our souls. 

Have a merry Christmas and let’s cherish the best gifts of all, Jesus’ birth and our adoption into His family! Jeff

Hi all,

We got hit this afternoon by a big dust storm that swept in from the southeast. Three minutes before I took the picture below, the sky was as blue as can be. Check out the video to see what I mean. These storms are literally a fast-moving wall of dust. Craziness.

I am still looking for a software dev job, I have one opportunity that is probable and a few that are maybes so we’ll see. God is taking good care of us while we wait though.

We are both going to teach conversational English classes one night a week with international students from the local university.

Debra is hosting a Turkish gal from the university as well. They will get together once or twice a month to hang out or go grocery shopping, whatever they decide to do. Debra will elaborate I’m sure.

More later,

Jeff

Our communication about what’s going on has been lax and for this we apologize. We are living day to day with little understanding of what two days from now holds and that has left us very focused on the here and now and not on communicating what might or might not happen in the future. But that’s left people out of the loop. So for our short-sightedness we really do apologize.

Just to recap a little bit, we spent 45 days in Iran from the first of April to May16th. Despite repeated attempts to renew our 30 day visa or receive our 3 year residency visa we were told we needed to leave Iran in order to receive an extension. We were hoping to leave Iran with a code that would facilitate the return visa but unfortunately this didn’t happen. We were given a time estimate of 7-10 days in Bahrain in order to receive a new 30 day visa.

We decided that we needed to give this waiting period a more definite deadline because in our last waiting period, the 45 day estimate we received turned into six months. We have been living our lives in temporary mode for exactly one year (we packed up the majority of our belongings into a container last June and have “moved” five times ) and it has become draining in many aspects. We felt that 30 days was a fair amount of time to wait on this current visa, so we set the deadline for June 15^th.

To ensure availability and decent ticket prices, we purchased refundable plane tickets back to the States for June 15th. If our Iranian visas come through during this next week, we’ll cancel our flight to the States and head to Iran. If however we don’t hear anything we’ll be heading to the States to visit with friends and family and diligently pursue what our next steps should be.

We would definitely appreciate your prayers as we seek God’s guidance in all of this. God has given us wonderful experiences in Iran and new Iranian friends. He has put Iran on our hearts like never before. Just yesterday I was telling my Iranian friend here in Bahrain that regardless of where we go in the future we would love to interact with Iranians.

We trust that God has the best possible plan for us so pray that we will persevere through these uncertain times and be listening for His voice.

Debra