We are looking forward to be going to the U.S. for a visit! From late July through late September we will be be on furlough. Furlough is a time away from our main ministry to reconnect with our sponsors, do fundraising for the hospital, spend time with our family and friends and hopefully have some rest and relaxation. It will be a busy time.
We hope to combine time in Washington, Oregon, and California with visiting dear friends and developing new relationships for Loma de Luz as well as some vacation time around the San Francisco area.
We'll be taking a road trip from California to Colorado with some time at the Grand Canyon.
We'll be spending time in Colorado with Marinajo’s family and then down south to spend time with Dave’s family.
We will finish our trip in the Nashville area to help Mariah get settled into her new home. Please see the next article for an update on Mariah's plans.
How you can help us
Most of you know that our family is largely supported by God through Dave's work via the internet with clients in the U.S. and that he generally earns enough to cover our minimum monthly needs. Beyond our minimum monthly living expenses, we are blessed to receive about $1000-$1100 per month from our regular donors for additional ministry expenses. Since we are not fully supported in the traditional way we do not have funds set aside for large ministry expenses or furlough trips. Below we have listed the different needs that we expect to have that would constitute the bulk of the expenses of the trip. Would you please consider and pray about how you might be able to help us regarding these needs?
Airfare - $2,800
Vehicle - $4,000 to use for our trip and to leave with Mariah
Fuel, lodging, and food - $2,000
If you'd like to help us financially with our furlough expenses, please click here: http://www.healthservicecorps.org/moto/page-53 Donations can also be sent by mail to:
Christian Health Service Corps PO Box 132 Fruitvale, TX 75127
Would you and your family be able to host us while we are on the road? We are planning on visiting San Francisco, Las Vegas (area), Flagstaff, and Albuquerque. Please email us at fields.fam@gmail.com and let us know if you can help us out!
Lastly, would you please be thinking and praying about any ways that we might be able to speak with churches, businesses, and/or missions minded people about the Cornerstone Foundation and Loma de Luz? We especially want to present our Solar Energy project to potential supporters. We are praying that God would use this time to build long term relationships on behalf of people who would like to partner with the kind of work that God is doing at Loma de Luz. This three minute video explains more about exactly what ministries Loma de Luz is involved in.
Mariah Nicole Fields The Potter's School
Class of 2015
Trust in the Lord with all of your might, lean not on your own understanding. Acknowledge the Lord in all of your ways and He will make your path straight. Proverbs 3:5-6
A New Reality
A new reality. Our biggest life change since coming to Honduras is only months away. Mariah has become a precious young woman in Christ and it is time for us to let her follow God’s path for her. It will be a new reality without Mariah as part of our everyday lives. The scripture above from Proverbs will be on Mariah’s High School Diploma. It is a scripture that teaches of trust, wisdom, faith, and humility with the acknowledgement that the Lord is the one who has guided, transformed, and led. This is where we find ourselves as a family – trusting the Lord, acknowledging and being led by Him.
Last summer Mariah felt a strong desire in her heart that she should pursue music, at least for a year, after she graduated. As this desire developed more fully she knew that it was from the Lord, “I love music, but I kept questioning my motives for wanting to leave (my family). Then, late one night, as I was praying, asking the Lord what He was doing in my heart, He gave me the word ‘worship.’” She has also struggled with not wanting to leave home as well as experiencing the dual pressure that most of her friends are going straight to college and many adults ask her the obvious question for a graduate, “Mariah, where will you be going to college?”
As Mariah describes in an essay that she wrote, “As I stand at the threshold that leads into the rest of my life, I hear many voices telling me my decisions now define everything in my future. I have some adults telling me that college is the only worthwhile option, society telling me to ‘be free’, and Jesus telling me to follow Him.” For Mariah, following the Lord means that she will be moving to Tennessee. She will be interning with a community outreach ministry as well as spending a time of focused study in music as expressed in worship.
Mariah has been accepted as a missions intern with Community Servants, an outreach ministry of Springhouse Arts and Worship Center in Smyrna, TN. She will be working and living in a low-income, multi-cultural, housing community that has been developed over many years into a thriving ministry and neighborhood. She will be serving widows and elderly, single mothers, and refugee families in the community through ESL classes, tutoring at an after-school program, and leading short-term mission teams among other things. Community Servants’ vision is to try to meet basic needs through their ministries, with the ultimate goal being that the people they reach would come to know Christ and take the Gospel back to their own people groups.
The same church that has accepted Mariah into the Community Servants internship is just full people who are gifted in music and the arts. We believe that Mariah will be studying under a husband and wife team, from the church, who have been involved in music ministry for many years in the Nashville area. She hopes to focus on, “Really learning and knowing the guitar”, vocal training, basic music theory, and the piano. In the midst of the music training she looks forward to learning more about what it means to live a life of worship and letting that worship flow through her music.
As we approach this big life change together, we are excited for Mariah and sad, at the same time, that she will be living far away from us. We are absolutely certain that God has orchestrated these opportunities for Mariah, indeed we see Him giving her “the desires of her heart” and leading her in His direction, really in miraculous ways. She will be living near people that we know and love and we know that they will love and care for her and watch over her. So it is with grateful and sad hearts that we will leave Mariah in Tennessee in September as our family ends our furlough trip this summer. As our family looks toward the difficult day that we leave Mariah in Tennessee we do so with hope and anticipation as she trusts the Lord in all of her ways and becomes the woman of God He created her to be.
