Joshua 1:9 (NKJV)
"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
"Many Christians estimate difficulty in the light
of their own resources, and thus they attempt very little and they
always fail. All giants have been weak men who did great things for God
because they reckoned on His power and presence to be with them."- Hudson Taylor
In my attempt to get
caught up with all of you Prayer Warriors out there I am going to do a
chronological post of the events that have transpired over the past two months
with us here in the field. I trust everyone has had a busy time around the
Christmas and New Year Holidays. I want to start off by saying I know how the
Holidays can be a time of missing our friends and relatives who have gone on to
glory ahead of us. I know firsthand since this is the first year since my
mother has passed away and also I understand how difficult when friends and
loved ones pass away and we are so far away from everyone and are not able to
just “drop in” and pay condolences. Truly the Lord is our refuge and strength.
I trust that our life is no different than yours as we all face struggles and
also get blessed with partaking in triumphs. The battle is knowing that the
trials are for our good and the triumphs really have nothing to do with us and
the glory is to be had by God alone.
I.C.C. DECEMBER OUTREACH:
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| Each Child received a Wellness Bag |
One of the Great Triumphs we get to give God glory for is
that Early in December marked the day that all 60 of the children in the Batey
Central School have been sponsored! To God Be the glory! Please take a moment
and click the link above to see each of them and when you do please say a
prayer for each of them and their families.
We
were blessed with a very busy schedule throughout all of December and on the
first weekend of December we received a NATIVE mission team sent to us from
Iglesia Cristiana de la Communidad (Community Christian Church) of Santo
Domingo. Let me just tell you they were a HUGE blessing!  |
| The Children had Skits, Music as well as the Bible Stories |
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| The children received so much love. |
We were so blessed to have Christina Froman return again for her “second round” living with the Rineholts and teaching at the School. You can read all about it here at her blog “reach out and teach” http://reachoutandteach.blogspot.com/ Wonder why she uses a boxing analogy referring to her return to the Rineholts and the School??? :)
THE KITCHEN:
As
soon as the team left we began the next phase of planning for the school. We started by laying out a new area for the kitchen to be built for the School. The
children are fed one hot meal a day at the school. This is a big blessing for
the families of the school as they know that the children will at least get one
hot meal a day as well as vitamins and fresh clean water to drink. The food is
being made offsite and carted in each day. This is very difficult as you can
imagine preparing a hot meal every day for over 60 children alone is a feat in
and of itself but to cart it in each day on a motorcycle is another thing
altogether. We staked out a building beside the school that will one day house
a kitchen facility to cook the meals for the children. The kitchen is 14’ x 14’
and will be constructed of concrete with a concrete roof to hold a water tank
that will provide the water to clean the dishes and keep the kitchen clean.We
began preparation for a team that will come later in December to help with
Construction. We took delivery on the Block, cement and rock that are needed to
begin the construction. We were able to bless a few of the men from the
community with a few days of work working with us to dig and pour the footers
as well as lay the first few courses of block to be certain we are ready for
the team.
We have been hosting a Youth Bible Study at our house since March of 2012. We have seen between 30 and 60 youth show up each week. I will not take much time to elaborate here but to let you know some of the sin plaguing this culture is in the area of promiscuity. As we have continued to study through the book of 1 Corinthians in our
weekly Youth Bible Study at our house here on the mountain in Alfa we have been
confronted with the issues of sexual sin in the Church. We have been discussing
that no matter what a culture tells us that God’s Word is our authority. When
God’s Word speaks counter to our culture we are obligated to be Obedient to God
and His Word if we call ourselves Christians and consider ourselves “the
Church”. It is common here for a 13 year old girl to be pregnant or a 14 year
old girl to be on to her second "marriage" and having her second child. God is
breaking our hearts for these babies who are having babies. Please pray for us
as we continue to share God’s Truth which is often difficult when the
opposition it seems is speaking with a megaphone and our voice is so small. We
have committed to Love these children no matter what their past is like, and to pour God's Love in to them.
Romans 5:8 "but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
MT VERNON DECEMBER TEAM:
So we prepared and received a team from Mt Vernon to come
and construct a new Kitchen. While this team was here we mixed concrete, laid
block, mixed more concrete, laid more block mixed more concrete, poured a
floor, you get the point! We also took time each day to go out in to the
community and share with the families of the sponsored children. Not everyone
of the families that have children in the school go to church with Wilkyns as
he teaches a Bible Study each Sunday morning at the school in the Batey.
However many more of the families have begun to be involved in the school and
some have been coming to the church. The children are the gateway in to the
home. It is our heart to nurture these LONG TERM relationships through prayer
for the families, teaching of the Bible and also answering questions about what
it is to be a disciple/follower of Jesus. The children are being taught every
school day the nature and doctrine of Jesus and what it means to follow Him. We
have seen spiritual fruit being formed and grown in these young lives as they
take on this nature and character of Christ one day at a time. Each time this
particular team comes to the Batey they pick up the conversation where they
left off last time with the same families. Developing a long term relationship
of trust and nurturing. It was such a blessing for us to read the letters from
the sponsors to the family. It was awesome hearing how the families who sponsor
the children are praying for the children at the school by name and praying for
their salvation and discipleship. We were blessed to see the tears of the
saints as they heard of their families in the USA who are holding them up in
prayer. It was genuinely moving and very exciting to know that the work is more
than anything material and transcends into the eternal. I cannot even begin to
tell you how awesome it was to spend more time with our friend Ken from MTV and
Jackie was just a blessing and huge encouragement to Jen while she was here.
Thank you , God for these people! We also made new lifetime friends in Teliah,
Kraig and Adam and very humbled to know such men and women of God. We were
excited to see the progress on the kitchen but very sad to see our friends
off to the airport, of course not without at least one flat tire!
As we get closer to Christmas we are all missing the music
of the Holidays and the American Parties that we would be invited to as well as
the extra time with family and friends, not to mention all the cookies, candies
etc that come with the holidays. We anticipate the Christmas Plane from
Missionary Flights International that not only contained much love from you all
for our kids for Christmas but also for the kids at the school. As for the
Children at the school we had received several boxes of love from First Baptist
Church of Essex as the Lord placed on their hearts to make shoe box gifts for
EVERY CHILD at the school! We received the boxes and began planning for a
Christmas party for the children at the school. We had cake, soda and shared a
Bible Story from the Gospel of Luke on the Birth of Jesus. We sang songs and
had a great time. Each child was presented with a gift shoebox and a stuffed
toy. They were so excited and they were so happy. We Thank God for partners in
ministry who allow God’s love to flow through them. You can see how happy the
children were to be blessed by you all thinking about them! Thank You!
EL PEÑON CHRISTMAS OUTREACH:
We celebrated our Christmas Meal on Christmas eve so we could do an outreach as a family on Christmas Day. We were so blessed by the presents that were flown in to our family for Christmas. We feel so loved by all of you! After the kids woke up early on 
Christmas morning and opened the presents followed by family time of prayer and reading of Luke 2 the Christmas Story, we packed up and headed out to a nearby community to share God's Love. So we were invited to do this Christmas Outreach in the town of El Penon. There is a church meeting there without a Pastor. They have about 40 children in the children's program. We took a projector, an inflatable screen, and a PA system to show the Christmas Movie in Spanish "The Toy That saved Christmas" a Veggie-tales Movie. It was a Hit with the kids. We also brought a snack of Cupcakes that Jen had made, and Soda and Popcorn the girls put together as a gift for the Children. Ricardo and I shared God love through the Christmas Story and God's plan of Salvation for them. With the heart of the child they responded graciously to the Word that was delivered. When Ricardo saw his picture of him in front of all the kids he told me he could not believe he is in front of all these people talking to them about Jesus. I told Ricardo to continue to walk in the calling God has for him and he will continue to be surprised to look back and see all that God will do through someone like him who just makes himself available! I know this update has been late getting to you, and for that I am sorry. As you can see we have been busy enjoying the labor in front of us. We are thankful to be serving our Lord and we are glad you are a part of this journey as well. There is so much more to say and I will save the prayer requests and answered prayer for the January Update that will follow this one.We Love you and Thank you for taking the time to pray for our family!
Blessings
The Rineholts!
ew
convert he opposes still more bitterly the Christian who is pressing on
toward a higher life in Christ. The Spirit-filled life is not, as many
suppose, a life of peace and quiet pleasure. It is likely to be
something quite the opposite. Viewed one way it is a pilgrimage through a
robber-infested forest; viewed another, it is a grim warfare with the
devil. Always there is struggle, and sometimes there is a pitched battle
with our own nature where the lines are so confused that it is all but
impossible to locate the enemy or to tell which impulse is of the Spirit
and which of the flesh.... My point here is that if we want to escape
the struggle we have but to draw back and accept the currently accepted
low-keyed Christian life as the normal one. That is all Satan wants.
That will ground our power, stunt our growth and render us harmless to
the kingdom of darkness. Compromise will take the pressure off. Satan
will not bother a man who has quit fighting. But the cost of quitting
will be a life of peaceful stagnation. We sons of eternity just cannot
afford such a thing. 
We have had many days in the past month tied to extreme physical
difficulty. These difficult things have given us yet another opportunity
to press in to our Heavenly Father and rely on Him for our strength and
comfort. I will merely highlight some of the things we have been faced
with as to not sound as my mom would have put it “a broken record”.
e
had no loss of life where we live due to the storm. That was not the
case for Haiti just 50 miles to the west of us. Over 40 people in Haiti
lost their lives. So my neighborhood and I got together and we spent a
day repairing our roads so that they would be passable. It was great to
see everybody who uses the road chip in and work on it. Many water pipes
are broken in our communities and a few cisterns have had problems
causing people for many days after the storm to stand in line to receive
water at a few projects that have a private well or water source. The
main water pipe coming from the San Rafael River was broken and this is
the supply that Everest a water filtering company uses to supply the
water that they purify and s
ell
in 5 gallon jugs (like Cloister etc… in the US) and they were out of
drinking water for 3 days. We found another place that sold water. I
bought 10 gallons of water from them and Jen and I both got sick from
this water. Thank God the drinking water pipe has been fixed. As I am
writing this (more than 2 weeks since Sandy) we just today were able to
buy the pipes to fix the water to our house and pray we are able to once
again get a secure water source for our family.
blem
here (and how well we understand) is that you never know if you are
going to have transportation. And then if everything works out and you
are able to get there, there is no guarantee the person administering
the treatment will show up, and if everyone shows up there is no
guarantee the medicine will be there. Since TB is contagious, the people
who have it are not truthful and honest about why they are sick. If
others know they have it they will be shunned. Here is a little excerpt
from the WHO on the TB situation in the DR:
