O come let us adore Him!

We have been married for 45 years! What a milestone! How grateful I am to Johan for all those years of love and loyalty, and how grateful we are together to God for all the blessings He has given us: our beautiful children, children-in-law, grandchildren and the work among children in need that we were able to do in Brazil and worldwide and which still continues.
 

45 years of marriage, 45 years of adventure with God!

In the Netherlands the housing shortage is extreem. So, we are also very grateful for the nice little home we have. We bought this as a holiday cabin from the inheritance my parents left us, more than 20 years ago, and now the municipality has converted our entire park from recreation to residential, which means that we are allowed to live here long term. In recent weeks we have fixed it up a bit, in between our work with the online classes. Johan has been installing extra insulation in the roof, and I was able to paint a lot. It is such a cozy little home!
 

For the first time in 12 years

Because our children live in different countries, it has been more than 12 years (!) since we were all together, but in December we hope to finally all be together again in England, to celebrate these 45 years together. We are so excited, counting the days!

Upside down

In the meantime, we will be giving the last teachings in November in the various online courses that we run throughout the year. Most of our students are missionaries who work with children in need, in many different countries.

“These lessons have turned my life upside down,” we recently heard from one of the students. “I thought I was going to start an orphanage for the very poor children from my town, but through your lessons I now see that it is better to help the families of these children, so that the children can grow up at home with their own parents”.

And so, we hear and read a lot of incredibly positive reactions from the students.

It is sometimes not easy to teach online courses and we miss the personal contact with the students, but what an encouragement such responses are!
 

Our students work with children in need in many countries,
such as this group of children in India

Second series of classes online and in person

This year we were able to teach the basic lessons of the Children at Risk School, in English and Portuguese. We hope to give the follow-up course next year. Like the first one, it will be on different days in English and Portuguese.

But we have also planned a few months of teaching in “real” classrooms. We do enjoy receiving photos and videos of the online students who have ministries among children in all kinds of countries, but it is really nice if we can be there with the students ourselves and we can give them practical hands-on lessons in addition to the theory.
 

With Dilma and Davi at a pancake restaurant.

Health of Davi

But next year's planning depends not only on our own health, but also on how Davi, our son, is doing. In the previous newsletter I wrote how he had been struggling with erysipelas on his leg since December last year, and he recently ended up in hospital for another week. He is now on a maintenance dose of antibiotics, but while this should reduce the risk of even more erysipelas, it also causes all kinds of side effects, making him quite discouraged at times. We have so much respect for him, how he has been able to remain positive and cheerful over the years, despite all kinds of physical setbacks and problems. But now it seems a bit more difficult. Would you also pray for him?
 

Christmas, Jesus the King

God became man, the kingdom of God drew near, and anyone who accepts Jesus as Lord is saved.

Jesus, the Physician. When the Lord Jesus walked in Israel more than 2,000 years ago, he healed all the sick who came to him to be healed. Here, we can see a glimpse of what that kingdom of God will be like when the Lord Jesus will return and when He is Lord and King over everyone: there will be no more sick people, no pain, no tears.

Jesus, the Prince of Peace in a time of wars. And we see a lot of horrible wars around us. Where hatred only breeds more hatred, He is the God of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Jesus, the “Waymaker”, the one who makes a way where there was no way, who solves problems where there seemed no solution, who provides comfort and hope in the most hopeless situations.

“Jesus is winning,” said Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth with a Mission, as he looked at all the messages he received every day from around the world.
 

Through the birth of Jesus, the kingdom of God came closer and became very accessible to us. With the arrival of this little baby in a stable in Bethlehem our God became man. O come, let us adore Him, that King!

Thank you!

We would like to thank everyone for your kind commitment to us and our work, your prayers, gifts, apps, emails, cards...

We wish everyone a happy and meaningful Christmas and a blessed New Year!

Lots of love!
 

Prayer points

• Thank God with us for the 45 years we have been happily married.

• Thank Him with us for the children, children-in-law, and grandchildren.

• Thank Him for allowing us to provide online courses to so many international missionaries again.

• Thank God for Christmas, God Immanuel, God with us.

• Pray for Davi's health.

• Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and peace in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen, Congo, and many other countries.

• Pray for peace in the refugee camps, the slums, the favelas, and in the families where they do not yet know God's peace.

• Pray that God's good news may continue to reach places and languages where they have never heard of the Lord Jesus.

Holiday troubles

Just before the summer holidays we were invited to teach for a week at the Cornerstone, a Bible school of the WEC in the south of the Netherlands, where missionaries are trained. We had been there a few times before and it is always wonderful to see the Lord call young people to give their lives in His Kingdom. Our week of classes was (of course 😊) about working with children in need.
 

 

Camping

After that we had a wonderful week of vacation together, camping near Cologne along the Rhine, and also a few days in the Ardennes. We had often heard about those beautiful places, but never seen them ourselves. Wonderful, what a breathtakingly beautiful nature God has given us!
 

 

Erysipelas again

In the previous letter I wrote that Davi, our son, had to undergo a skin graft operation on his knee, which went well, but a few weeks later he got erysipelas again, the fourth time in eight months, and suddenly it got worse very quickly. He was admitted to the hospital, but luckily after much prayer from many people, and after intravenous antibiotics, he recovered.
 

We still had a little vacation with them.

We had planned to have two weeks of vacation with Davi and Dilma, and to go away for some days together and do fun things, but suddenly all those plans were jeopardized. Fortunately, Davi was allowed to come home after a week in hospital. We were so grateful with the nurses that came every day to our home, to help bandage his leg! So, we were busy all morning with his care, but in the afternoon and evening we could often go away for a while to do something special. How wonderful that we have a van with a lift for the wheelchair, what a blessing!
 

Going to Ikea, and building a new desk together!

  

An afternoon in the shopping

The online courses will start again.

The online courses we provide also continued in May and June, but in July and August there was a holiday break. We hope to start again in September and will run until mid-November.

The sisters are together in Brazil.

Johanneke and Jonathan are in Brazil with their daughters for a few weeks. They have given seminars and have helped Michele and Romeu several times with the Lamalma Children's Camps that they organize there in the weekends. Of course, we enjoyed the delightful photos and videos of our two daughters and their families, doing ministry together. We would have loved to be there as well!
 

 

We are looking forward to Michele, Romeu and their kids coming to the Netherlands on furlough at the end of November, to share about their beautiful work in churches, Bible studies, and schools, and testify to what God does in the lives of children from slums, when they spend a weekend at the Lamalma camp.

We want to thank you all for your faithful support in prayer, encouragement, visits, financial and in-kind gifts, e-mails and cards. Thank you for your love. We wish everyone God's rich blessing.

Under the cloud

"I have 7 brothers and sisters. Together with my mother we have been living here in Bulgaria for a year now, my father is still in Ukraine," said "Oksana" a 9-year-old girl.

We were in Bulgaria for a few weeks to, among other things, teach a course on trauma recovery to about 30 mothers so that the next day we could help them explain what they had learned to their own children. The first day was an immediate success. These women were part of a group of several thousand women and children who had all fled from the Odessa region of Ukraine to Varna, a tourist city on the Black Sea, at the beginning of the war. They had been accommodated in the somewhat rundown hotels on the beach and had been living there for over a year now.

At first, they had hoped, of course, that it would only be for a few weeks, but now, after more than a year, they were ready to get some rest, and to accept that it could all last much longer.
 

The eight of them under the "cloud"

Oksana showed me a drawing of her family, "Eight little dolls, together under a cloud on which I drew God,” she explained to me, “who protects us and cares for us." Her gratitude and recognition of God's faithfulness moved me, as so many of their stories moved me. What brave women and children, and how open they were to be learning more about God as their father, and about processing their trauma.
 

One of the Ukrainian ladies who participated, and a teenager. 

In Bulgarian and English

We heard so many harrowing stories during those weeks, but also saw how God is present, using international as well as local Christians to encourage and support the refugees. A small group of those Bulgarian Christians are participating in the online course we teach, which runs from April to November this year, so we can mentor the students over a longer period of time.

The Bulgarian students will have the lessons translated from English into Bulgarian. Also in that English-speaking group are over 30 students from a variety of Eastern European, African, Asian, and South American countries. They are generally young missionaries working with children in need.

And also in Portuguese…

And then every month we teach the same class two days later in Portuguese to over 80 students from Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe, all countries where Portuguese is the main language.

We can give this course to such a large group of international students because we have an amazing group of 30 staff members, spread around the world, all of whom have years of experience working with children in need. Each of these facilitators supervises a group of 4-8 students. They hold Zoom meetings with their students, have a WhatsApp group with them between meetings, make phone calls with them, send them messages, mentor and encourage them. How special to be able to work with such a large, diverse group of wonderful people!
 

Twice to England

Johan and I are quite busy with this course, but because these are online classes and online students, we can do our work anywhere there is internet service. That's why we have been able to travel to England twice this year. The first visit came about when our daughter Johanneke and her husband Jonathan invited us to record Johan's lessons in their studio, so that in addition to the Zoom life lessons, we can also offer them on an online platform. It was great fun to do, and it turned into a series of 13 lessons.
 

On our second visit we were in England to take care of our granddaughters while Johanneke and Jonathan went to India to make documentaries. We really enjoyed the time with our beautiful granddaughters there.
 

We were the weekend just before the coronation of King Charles in London

We also had the opportunity from England to address and teach (online) the staff of Youth with a Mission in Ukraine, who were holding a conference. A Ukrainian translator had just arrived in England at the base where we were staying, and they helped with translation. This was very special!
 

With our Ukrainian translator

And meanwhile, the online course is "just" running. We experience it as a blessing to be able to do this, to be able to pass on all kinds of principles that we learned during our 36 years in Brazil with our work among children in need, to a lot of young missionaries. What a privilege to be able to teach and encourage, together with our daughter Michele (one of the online facilitators) & others in her generation, the next young generation. Would you be willing to pray for these young online students? They often live in underdeveloped countries and work under difficult conditions. But they are so motivated to learn new things. We heard from one of the African students that he drives 50 km on a moped to get to the nearest village with internet. He then sits outside in a square, with all kinds of children running around, and participates in the online lessons!

Knee surgery

We have another prayer point: Davi, our youngest son, has had problems with his leg since the beginning of December. It started with wounds on his foot and a bacterial infection, but because he is paralyzed, he didn't feel it, and it quickly became a large deep wound on his knee. In March he had his first surgery, and this week he must go under the knife again, this time for a skin graft because the wound itself is not closing.
 

He very much hopes (and we with him) that he will be able to go to a huge conference here in the Netherlands, to camp there together with us. It is a conference that happens every year and normally has around 50.000 Christians participating and camping.

It is becoming more and more of a challenge to take Davi camping, because he also needs quite a lot of specialized care. It is handy that I used to be a nurse myself, so together with Johan I can take over his care for a few days. But this time with the surgery so close before Pentecost, it is an extra challenge.

Dilma and another group from the Pinnenburg, the ministry where Davi and Dilma both receive special residential care, also hope to go and camp there. And we've also invited our three grandchildren who live in the Netherlands to join us. That promises to be quite a celebration!
 

Thank you all so much for upholding us financially and in prayer. Thanks for your encouraging emails and messages. We wish everyone God's rich blessing!

Prayer points

• Pray for the Ukrainian mothers and their children in Bulgaria, but also in all the other countries they have fled to. May their faith in God be their support, hope and strength every day.
• Pray for peace, in Ukraine, in Myanmar, in Sudan, in Gaza, in the Congo, and in so many more places of unrest around the world.
• Thank God for all the students who want to learn more about working with children in need, and for the biblical principles behind this.
• Pray for recovery of Davi's knee, that it will heal well, and that he will regain his full energy.

Wow! 180 international students!

What a wonderful month we had in Harpenden, England, with Johanneke and Jonathan and their three girls. It was so good to be able to be together again on Johanneke's birthday, she turned 40! It was such a pleasure to spend a few weeks with their beautiful family again.
 

In the studio

Jonathan had already invited us several times to record our teachings on children at risk in his studio, so that later, we can put them on our website and thus have another way to offer our seminar. Therefore, thirteen lessons were professionally recorded in front of a green screen. Jonathan and Johanneke are now busy editing them.
 

 

YWAM Ukraine

We also received an invitation to teach the seventy missionaries on staff with YWAM Ukraine, about helping the traumatized parents and children. That became possible through a lesson via Zoom, together with a Ukrainian translator, who was also in Harpenden, England that same week!
 

With our Ukrainian translator

180 international students

Right now, we are preparing the two online courses that we will be giving this year. We have a total of over 180 students and over 30 facilitators from 37 different countries! The courses will run from April to November. Well, that will keep us busy!

It is great to see that so many students have signed up to learn how to work with children in need, and that so many facilitators are willing to join forces, so each will take a group of 6 students under their wing and accompany the students personally.

Mothers and children with trauma

After our trip to England, we spent two weeks in Bulgaria where we were invited to give a seminar in Varna, on the Black Sea. There, a few thousand Ukrainian refugees, mostly mothers with their children, live in hotels which are not being used for tourists during the winter. We were invited to teach a small group of them (30 women) some practical steps on how to help their own children deal with the traumas they suffered from the war. It is now the intention that some of these women continue with this material, to teach it to other mothers, so that many more children can be helped.
 

Prayer points

Please, will you pray for these women and children, and of course for so many other Ukrainian families in and outside Ukraine. It is such a terrible tough time for them.

Would you also pray for the online seminars we will be giving from April to November? That the Lord may use these classes to build up and encourage the many students and facilitators? So that many children will be reached with His love?

Blessings and love!

That cannot be a coincidence

"Could you maybe come to Angola for a few months? And also a few weeks to Thailand, and Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria and even Ukraine...?"

We were in Brazil in December at a large conference of Youth with a Mission, where mostly Brazilian workers gathered, as many as 600 (!), for a great week together.

Most of them work in Brazil, but there are also a lot of Brazilians who have gone as missionaries to African and Asian countries, where they are now working with children in need and their families, often in poor slums.

So, we had lots of good times during that conference, having breakfast or lunch with different Brazilian missionaries, and over and over again we were asked if we would please come and spend a few weeks or a few months helping, advising and teaching. Well, we would love to help them all, but to travel to all those countries to teach our classes would take a lot of time and money.

"Would you be helped by a two-week online seminar?", we asked.

"That's very short," was the disappointed answer. "Besides, it's kind of difficult to stop our work completely on site for two weeks with all our staff, (often working in orphanages, elementary school and community centers) to attend the classes..."

"What then if we only teach one day a month, online, but throughout the year, so that homework can be done in between, such as reading articles and books, but where there also be time to have online mentor calls in between, for questions and advice and prayer?"

"Yes, that would be great!!!"

Confirmation

We prayed about it for a few more weeks, and it actually seemed like a good plan, to start doing this in Portuguese for the Brazilian missionaries. But then we got a call from missionaries in Bulgaria....

"We have a group of 25 young people working with children in need, would you be open to give them an online course, one day a month, but throughout the year?" Was the question.

Johan and I looked at each other: this was quite a surprising confirmation, exactly the same plan we already had in Portuguese for the Brazilian missionaries! This could not be a coincidence.

Two courses

As a result, we are now working hard, preparing two online courses: one in Portuguese and the other in English. The latter with the possibility of choosing a Bulgarian simultaneous translation during the Zoom classes.

 

Meanwhile, we have a whole bunch of experienced facilitators, all over the world, who will help us, mentoring the students this year.

We are going to need them, because the course in Portuguese has just been announced and there are already over 60 registrations! I think that when 100 students have registered for both courses, we will have to stop enrolling, otherwise there will be too many students to give personal attention. But it does show that there is clearly a need for the classes we teach. Of course, this is quite a challenge for us, but also an encouragement!

Will you pray with us for these courses and the students? That it will really be quite an encouragement for them, and they will learn many new and practical tools for their work among children in need?

Thank you very much for your friendship, prayer and financial contribution to our expenses.

We pray God's rich blessing on you all!
 

Teaching in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil

In January 2023 Johan taught at Heidebeek, YWAM Netherlands