September ’20 Family Update

Corona

After a night at a bonfire with a cold wind, Anja came down with a nasty cold, including a sore throat, a runny nose, coughing, sneezing and fatigue. Unfortunatley, it slowly made it’s way from one family member to the next. When our friends told us, that their neighbor had discovered that he has COVID, and their children had been playing with each other wer were not excited. Of course, we wanted to make sure that we were not affected. So after seven days, we did a quick test, which turned out negative. Praise the Lord for that!

Loss of Taste and Smell

During this time, Chris lost his taste and smell. At first, we expected it to be COVID, but then the test came back negative. Rather than panicking, Chris seized the opportunity to try new things, such as drinking tea with an awful lot of limes and ginger so he could only feel the afterburn in his throat. It’s funny how the loss of a sense automatically allows other senses to become more sensitive. Some positive aspects were evident, like not being able to smell Ziva’s full diaper and thus, not having a problem taking care of the biggest mess. The weekly pizza night is noteworthy as well because the only thing Chris could enjoy was the “mouth feeling” 😛 Overall, it was an interesting experience, trying new things with a symptom that people normally freak out about.

Church

At the same time, Rosarito, the town were our church is located, was hit with a second wave of corona cases. Our Senior Pastor, Mike Vincent, therefore made the wise decision to close the church down for two weeks, so that people could recover instead of spreading the virus and to only offer online services during that time. For Anja, this meant spending more time at home, taking care of Ziva while Chris was at church, where he was in charge of the lighting during the services.

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Marriage Counseling

Being married for seven years, we had been wanting to get marriage counseling for a while. Now we finally took the step. We had been attending the marriage fellowship at Calvary Chapel Rosarito on Tuesday evenings before the Corona crisis, but found that it did not help us in the way we hoped it would. So now, we have been seeing the Executive Pastor of CCR, Jesús Ochoa, a couple of times and he helped us to resolve some of the conflicts we had never been able to settle ourselves and to see each other with a different pair of eyes. His best advice so far, spend half an hour every day talking with each other, giving each other undivided attention, i.e. no smartphones, TV, etc. Something every couple should try sometimes.

We have also been receiving communication training from the Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel Rosarito, Mike Vincent. His focus is communication within the marriage, based on The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. Knowing each other’s love language, it has become quite evident how we can improve our communication and make each other feel more loved. Another thing that we are required to do is to go on a date once a week while Ziva is staying with one of our friends for a couple of hours. Last time, we went horseback riding, which was of course Anja’s highlight despite the fact that she was not allowed to race the horse on the beach, which was actually what she had been looking forward to. However, it was an interesting ride and it was followed by a visit at Pasta y Basta, an Italian Restaurant run by an Italian Chef that serves authentic, Italian food. It was amazing!

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Here are some nuggets from our two sessions with Pastor Mike.

• The nr. 1 mistake in marriage is focusing on each other’s faults.
• Focus on fulfilling God’s role for you in marriage. As you do that, God will bring back the spark, the romance, etc.
• NEVER judge a man when he is making an effort to communicate.
• Never bring up your own point when your spouse is addressing a point. Keep your mouth shut and say something like, “I wasn’t aware of that, thank you for pointing it out to me.”
• When you want to criticize your spouse, use the following sentence, “When you do/say … you make me feel like….”. By doing this, you don’t point fingers, but talk from your own perspective, on the effect your spouse’s actions and words have on you.

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Today’s Good News

Being a student in the church planting class and a part of staff, it was almost inevitable that Chris was asked to do an episode of “Today’s Good News” on the Calvary Chapel Rosarito’s Youtube channel. The goal of the series is to present the audience every morning with an about five minute long devotional to start their day encouraged. Since it was his first time speaking for the online community, Chris was very nervous, but also felt a huge excitement about getting Today’s Good News out. Watch for yourself:

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Lights (by Chris)

This month, the first project was to set up better lighting, especially for the live stream. So I started to make a plan and got green light for the first step, the back lighting and a new controller for the lights. Putting the lights up was easy, but the controller took some time to get delivered, which is why I have had to use my own laptop to do the lights until now. Since we closed the church due to COVID for two weeks and only did online services, I had enough time to set up the new controller and get the programming going. Now I just need to teach the other light masters how to use the new controller.

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In between, I had time to take care of some older lights, such as the moving heads in the picture below. As you can see in the pictures, nobody had maintained the devices and it didn’t come as a surprise that there was a ton of dust in there. But after the dust cloud had dispersed, they arose to new life and are working just fine now. Another project I started was to upgrade the lights in the pillars with LED lines. Although I had to collect the necessary tools beforehand, once I had them, I felt like back in the old days, when I would just go for another crazy project and make something look nice (I love working with lights). And the freshly maintained moving heads allowed me to work with much better light 🙂

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Ziva (by Anja)

I usually take Ziva to the playground twice a day, when the sun is not beating down as strong and hot, so before 10am and past 2:30pm. What used to be quite the journey for her when she was starting to walk, is now a piece of cake. Ziva has now started to willingly take my hand when going places, which is adorable. Her very long times on the swing have now turned into very short times, but she still likes to get up the climbing wall, but she doesn’t want to go on the slide as often anymore.

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Recently, she has started to move around on the different levels of the jungle gym and to play with the steering wheel. When she is done playing, instead of just sliding down, she wants to launch herself into my arms. I can’t lie, I kind of enjoy it 😉 So far, I have been able to detect two highlights during our times at the playground. The first thing is following and petting the good-natured gray tomcat that willingly endures all of Ziva’s unvoluntary kicks, steps on his tail and not so gentle touches with never ending patience. The second thing is watching people playing ball. She can stand there for an enternity, just watching people play soccer or basketball. It’s incredible!

Sometimes, we notice that she is trying to say certain words. At the end of one of her learning videos about African animals, there is the hyena, so when the video has ended, she says something like “nanana”. I always wait for it because it’s just SO adorable!

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Thank You!

A special THANKS to all of you who supported us this last month in prayer and financially!

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Prayer Requests

• Financial provision
• Protection from COVID and overall health
• Protection and growth for our marriage