100x25 Challenge

We are so close!!

Will you consider being a ministry partner? We are close enough now to begin packing our crates and making final preparations! In this challenge we are asking people to consider simply committing $25 per month. That's all it would take to help us get to Indonesia and begin our first term ministering to the remote communities through our aircraft. We are praying that by the end of this year the Lord will provide...

100 new ministry partners* giving $25/month

To be completed by January 1, 2013

We are excited at how far the Lord has brought us, and we are excited to see the light at the end of the tunnel! Some of you have been following us for 4 years since Matt graduated Moody and started instructing with Moody Aviation. Some of you are just joining us! We're glad you are all with us...and we hope you can feel our excitement as we are now so close to jumping on that long plane ride to Indonesia. We know the Lord has awesome things waiting for us there as we reach out to some of the most remote communities on earth through aviation.

Here is a short video we put together about our family, the ministry we will be doing in Indonesia, and how you can get involved with us.

Will you help us fulfill our 100 x 25 challenge by the end of this year? Will you join the nearly 100 individuals and churches who have already partnered with us to bring us up to 65% of our monthly need, and 100% of our outgoing expense? 

Stay tuned on facebook, check the blog often, and share our excitement as we watch the 100 (people) tick down to 0! 

How to begin partnering with us...
1.) Go online to www.maf.org/scheer and follow the prompts on the right to set up special or recurring gifts.  MAF accomodates major credit cards and can also do automatic bank withdrawals.

2.) Call MAF Donor Services directly and talk to Jackie Dean who would love to help you get set up in whatever way is most convenient for you. 800-208-0800

3.) If you still have one of our prayer cards just fill out the tear-off page in the back and send that in to the address on the card.  You can set up credit card payments, bank transfers (send a voided check), or make special gifts this way.

4.) Most importantly...send us an email or FB message letting us know that God has led you to begin a partnership with us so we can share in the excitement!  We'll be updating the 100 x 25 challenge with each new partnership and watching that 100 tick down to 0!

* Ministry Partners are faithful prayer warriors and committed, generous givers who hear the Lord calling them to fill a vital role in reaching the lost for the Kingdom of God through Jesus Christ in remote areas around the world

Our Story

In honor of our seven year anniversary, I thought I would share the incredible story of how God brought us together from across the globe, for those who have not heard. It's a story that shows how anything is possible with God if it's in His plan!

Matt grew up in Rwanda, Africa, until the age of 18 when he came to the states to attend Wheaton College in Illinois. I grew up in Bellevue, WA, just outside of Seattle. I was 22 and in the midst of my nursing pre-requisites in Bellevue at the time. One morning I woke up debating whether I should go to church since I had a huge anatomy and physiology exam the next day. I finally decided I didn't want to miss and I'm sure glad I did! All of a sudden, in walks this extremely handsome guy that I had never seen before! I found out that he was on spring break from Wheaton and had come, along with some other friends, to visit a mutual friend Airika. We were introduced and I learned that he was interested in missions like I was, and he was planning on becoming a missionary pilot. I'd never even heard of missionary aviation before but it sounded awesome! After meeting that one day, he left to go back to Wheaton. I was so disappointed.....here was this great guy and I'd probably never see him again!

After a couple of weeks however, Matt built up the courage to email me and we started an email friendship (also after some encouragement from our matchmaking friend Airika). In the meantime, he graduated from Wheaton and informed me that he had taken a position with an organization called Samaritan's Purse and would be working in Sudan for a year while he waited for a spot to open up at the Moody Aviation Program in Tennessee. Now pay close attention because this information is crucial to the story....the program was in Tennessee. I remember being so frustrated....I had already attended school in Tennessee and that chapter of my life was over!

We talked on the phone for the first time the night before he left for Sudan, and from there on had to write hand written letters that would take weeks to get to each other, and by then it was old news. He was in such a remote area (the area that is now being bombed by the government), it was actually the missionary pilots that brought him my letters! I remember thinking, "I know anything is possible with God, but how in the world are we ever going to be in the same place at the same time?" I had been accepted to the Washington State nursing program in Spokane in the meantime and moved there, not knowing anyone. He was planning on finishing up his time in Sudan and starting the Moody program in Tennessee. Then one day I got a phone call....the Moody Program had decided to shut down and relocate to....can you guess where? SPOKANE!!!!!! I remember getting chills. Of all of the cities in the country, what were the chances that this program would come to Spokane?????? Matt got the news on a satellite phone in the middle of the Sudanese desert and was shocked. He'd never even heard of Spokane until he met me. He had even bought me an African necklace, not knowing if we'd ever see each other again.  God is so amazing! There's no way that this was just a coincidence.

He then moved to Spokane and we immediately started dating. The rest is history.

Working Together

Matt and I both have a pretty good understanding of the "body of Christ" and how each part of the body has a different function, working together in unity, but we never really experienced it until this last year. We have been absolutely blown away by the generosity of others to help get us to Indonesia, not only financially (though that has been a big part), but also by the way people have given up their time, spiritual gifts, and resources to help us!

Here are a few examples:

• One family is allowing us to drive their van until we leave since ours was totalled in an accident.
• A group from our church came over to help us re-side our house
• Another family allowed us to stay in their Arizona home while we were sharing about the ministry down there.
• Several people got up on a Saturday morning to come help with the house, even though it was raining
• One of our supporters put together a team to get our house/yard ready to put on the market (see picture below)
• Donations to our garage sales to fund raise for our ministry
• Donations of kids clothes since we have to get together four years worth of clothes to take!
• Setting up small group meetings, luncheons, and barbecues so that we can share about our work
• One family is funding the remaining balance on our one-time amount that we have to raise, bringing us up to 100%!!! Now we just have the monthly amount to raise.
• Donations towards our Indonesia set-up costs
• One man from church came over to put up new trim around our doors

Thanks to each of you who have been a part of this...we couldn't do this without you....you know who you are!

Blake helping the ladies plant flowers...he's such a little helper!

This is Our Life

I've realized over the years that there are three things that I need to function normally and stay somewhat sane....sleep, some sense of routine, and the sense of being settled. Take those away over a longer period of time and add sickness, pregnancy, low back pain, and stress of almost every kind, and I just about lose it. We just returned from a week long trip to California for Matt's younger brother, Andy's, wedding. Before I go into some of the highlights of the trip, in addition to the fact that it was probably one of the most beautiful wedding settings I have ever seen, I'm going to describe some of the events that almost brought me to the breaking point. This is only some of the chaos that occurred...there was much more that I won't mention. I will warn you that this includes talking about pee and poo, one of the realities of being a parent, so if you can't handle it you may want to stop reading!

Let me start by going back to the few weeks prior to the wedding. We have been laboring away at clearing out our house of all of the stuff we have been collecting over the last seven years, holding garage sales, and finishing house projects in preparation to put the house on the market. It's amazing how much stuff we can accumulate over that period of time! In addition, we were juggling parenthood, building our support team, and preparing for the California trip. Every night we hit the pillow hard. In fact one night Matt was so tired, he didn't even have the energy to walk up the stairs after putting Blake to bed, so he just crashed on the floor in the downstairs room!

One of our lovely garage sales

Our trip to California began with driving the five hours to Seattle and flying out from there, flying the next day to San Jose, and then driving five hours to the wedding site in a small town called Biggs. Three days in a row of travel was pretty exhausting and tough on the kids (especially nap schedules), and if you've ever flown with kids you know how stressful that can be.

Andy and Jenny were married on her parent's farm in the walnut orchard (beautiful!) and Matt was the best man. Thanks to Jenny's family, we were able to stay with Matt's parents and Andy (his brother) in an extra house on their farm. The house had been uninhabited for a long time and some things we needed were brought in for the sole purpose of this event (furniture, kitchen utensils etc). The night we got there I felt so wiped out that I told Matt....."our life has got to slow down...I'm going to get sick!" Sure enough, the next morning I woke up with a sore throat and it went downhill from there. All four of us were in one room due to space, and I had to try not to cough or sneeze in fear of waking up the kids. The night before the wedding we only slept about 2 hours because we all kept waking each other up. Callie would cry and Blake would pop up in his bed, turn to us and say "whaaaat are you dooooooing?!!!" If I wasn't so tired and sick it would have been comical.

The ceremony site in the walnut orchard 

Before the wedding I spent a considerable amount of time preparing snacks for the kids in hopes that they would be quiet for the ceremony, but despite my efforts, they both were cranky as ever and fussing from the beginning. Just as Jenny was approaching the altar in dead silence, something irritated Callie and she started throwing her milk around, screaming and crying. I quickly picked her up and made my way through the crowd, losing my shoes in the process, and whisked her as far away as possible. In the meantime I realized that Blake, seeing that I was gone, had started to cry. I think at that point I heard some of the crowd start to chuckle. Matt's sweet cousin Jesse then brought Blake to me. With a pounding head, burning sore throat, and running on two hours of sleep, I can't even begin to describe how emotionally and physically drained I felt. Now that both of our kids had disrupted the ceremony and were gone, it proceeded normally and was  beautiful (from what I heard). I was pretty disappointed to have missed the entire thing. The reception was amazing and was full of great food, sparkling lights, and a beaming Andy and Jenny.

Andy and Jenny!

Before the dancing was over the kids were getting pretty tired and cranky, so I took them back to the house to give them a bath and put them to bed. I was ready to crash myself. As I'm running a bath and about to put them in, Callie peed all over me and my dress. Having to ingore the pee trickling down my legs, I quickly washed them (they were almost as dirty as their cousin Abby in the picture below!) and pulled Callie out of the tub. She then peed again all over the floor. After cleaning up I pulled Blake out....all the while Callie is getting into the garbage can and dropping things into my water glass.

The next night the kids started to get sick. Callie wouldn't stop crying in her bed, so we decided to give her some Tylenol. Realizing that we didn't have a dropper or the dose, Matt drove the several miles into town to get a dropper while I had to call my mom for the correct dose (no internet at the house). In addition to the chaos, earlier that evening Blake came out into the kitchen saying that he needed to be changed. We still don't have him potty trained because we have had too many transitions and haven't been home for a long enough period of time (we plan on starting that this week). We then noticed that he had poop down his leg and on his foot and had tracked it all through the living room, hallway, and bedroom. It was also on the wall because he was crouching in the corner! Finding no clean towels or washcloths to clean it up, we also realized there were no more paper towels and we only had two wipes left! AAAAHHHHH! Eventually we thoroughly cleaned everything.

A couple of days later it was time to drive the five hours back to San Jose and leave California. Somehow on the way to the airport we took some wrong turns and were running extremely late. Then in the security line Blake had a major meltdown and started screaming and stomping up and down, which lasted all the way to the gate....people staring at us and making comments the whole way. How embarrassing! To his credit, we had had an exhausting week and he was getting sick. Also along the way we realized that Callie had pooped and of course it had gotten on her clothes. In all the chaos we had forgotten to pack a clean change of clothes (usually we are much more organized), so we found another less dirty set of clothes and put those on. We made it to the gate just as people were boarding.

This doesn't cover all of the difficulties of the trip, but I will say that there were good things about this trip too. Andy and Jenny had the most amazing wedding and everything went smoothly. We were able to spend some quality time with family, Jennie's aunt and uncle put on an amazing barbecue for us with about thirty people and we shared about our ministry, and Matt's sister Jamie and brother-in-law Eric blessed us with a night's stay in a beautiful hotel the night before we left. I tried to focus on the things that we are thankful for. Sometimes we do better about having a good attitude than other times, and this was one of those times that I just didn't do too well. I don't have anything profound to say about all of this or any life lessons that I learned along the way.....sometimes life is just hard and we are just tired. Then we learn of something awful that someone else is going through, like our friend who's little girl is in the ICU and might lose her limbs. It puts things into perspective. We are blessed and God is still good. This is our life right now and I'm a work in progress, striving to praise God through the stress and the hard times.

Cousin Abby playing in the dirt at the reception

Blake and his cousin Zach having a great time on the ride-on tractor

  She loved the slide!

 Blake enjoying his cupcake

Matt on the cherry picker, helping set up for the wedding

Thoughts on a Missionary's Ultimate Sacrifice

Today, two fellow missionaries, a brother and sister in Christ, were laid to rest in the African country of Zambia. Jay and Katrina Erickson were killed in a plane crash on Saturday, leaving behind two little girls almost the exact ages of Blake and Callie. Their friends, family, and the entire missionary aviation community are in a state shock and grief. They had only been flying in Africa since February and it was Katrina's first time off the station since they had arrived. Jay had attended Moody Aviation with Matt and had begun flying for a small mission hospital in Zambia.

Matt and I have had heavy hearts all week as the full weight of this news has sunk in. Thinking about those little girls, it's difficult not to look at our own precious babies as we ponder our future in Indonesia. We have always known the risks, but it's easy to think that it won't happen to us. Fear is such a poison, waiting to creep in and immobilize it's victims. Yet in 2 Timothy it says "For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and of a sound mind (1:7). I think back to when I struggled with my call to the mission field and all of the horrible things that could happen to me or, mostly, to my family. I think of the questions He has asked me over the years as I struggled with my own fear....am I not worth it? Did I not give my life for you? Do you trust me.....trust that I see the big picture and that I cause all things to work together for good? Will you follow me no matter the cost, even if it is great in order to bring others into salvation? Wrestling with these questions brought me to a place of peace and surrender. Yes, Lord, you are worth it.

Jay and Katrina may have wrestled with similar fears taking their two girls to Africa, but they placed their trust and their lives in their loving Creator, knowing that "to live is Christ, to die is gain (Phil 1:21)." We know that just as He promised, He will bring good out of this tragedy and that as believers we are not without hope. We have peace in the fact that this is only our temporary home. We can look forward to the fact that we will get a new, perfect body and that Jesus is preparing a place for us. Jay also had this peace. It seems that God was even preparing him for what was to come. On April 20th he wrote these words on his blog:

Oddly enough, I (Jay) have been pondering the concept of death since arriving at Chitokoloki. Living next door to a bush hospital, we hear quite clearly the wails of mourning with each death. And these occur frequently, being about every other day. In addition, I have been reading through Israel’s wanderings through the wilderness and all the times God’s wrath was poured out such that each time thousands were consumed, bitten, swallowed, or otherwise perished. Still again, I have been reading Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, which though a fictional work, deals philosophically with death. Even in eating meat here when I saw the creature alive that morning reminds me of the topic.



I did not plan the correlation, but it caused me to think along these lines and realize again in a new way that there is nothing sad about the death of a Christian. The only sadness (and I do not intend to belittle this aspect) is in the loss of companionship by those left behind. And yet, to contrast this, the level of tragedy is so vast for the passing of an unbeliever. To borrow from physics, it seems the “equal and opposite reaction.”


It warms my heart to hear the frequent and fervent preaching of the Gospel here. Perhaps it is the real presence of death here that we seem so surgically removed from in the USA which is the motivation. At any rate, I hope it will inspire me to get over those inhibitions which so easily hinder me from speaking.


I will close with a quote from C.S. Lewis which is at the foundation of my thinking: “You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” And I know that when this body dies, my soul will get a new one.

*Please keep the families of Jay and Katrina in your prayers, especially their sweet little girls as they return from Africa to live with relatives in Seattle.

Setbacks

Unfortunately since we arrived back in Spokane we have been hit with some frustrating setbacks. The day before we left Arizona, my (Ellie) back went out and I could barely move. We weren't sure if we'd even be able to fly home but we forced it because we really needed to get back. I won't lie, it was a horrible day of travel. I was in excruciating pain the entire time, almost passed out at check in, and Callie had to miss a nap and was pretty difficult, but we made it. Since then I've been bedridden for several days without much improvement. Thankfully my parents came the day after arriving home and have been a huge help.

In addition, today was supposed to be the day to tackle our house/yard projects in preparation to sell and we woke up to rain! People from the church came to help but there wasn't much we could do since most of the projects that need to be done are outside. We will get it all done when it gets done I guess. In the meantime we need to just trust that God has good reasons for all of these things.

We could really use prayer for healing for my back. It's hard not to feel completely discouraged as this has been an ongoing issue. I'm still working with a physical therapist to build my core strength, but the fact that I am pregnant doesn't help the issue (the hormones cause the joints/ligaments to be loose).

Please also continue to pray that we can overcome the obstacles to selling the house and moving out, and for peace during this time.

Thank you to all who are a part of this journey with us, and for your prayer and encouragement!

Leaving Arizona and Next Steps

Our time here in Arizona is coming to a close and we are gearing up for the chaos that awaits when we get home (I'll explain below). Though we are feeling ready to be back in Spokane again, we have had an awesome time. Our main goal of the trip was for building our ministry team but we made a vacation out of it too. The weather has been gorgeous, clear skies and average temps in the nineties or higher.

On Wednesday we will board a plane back to Spokane and start a series of some pretty major events over the next several weeks. We had a realtor friend come to look at our house and after his advice and some prayer, we feel that this is the best time to put our house on the market. One thing that we hadn’t anticipated however was moving out before it sells, but he felt that it would be too difficult with young kids (and the small size of our house) to live there while on the market. I had wondered how we would possibly be able to keep it clean with two little ones and toys everywhere, but it never crossed my mind that moving out early would be the solution. In ways we are definitely ready to be free of the burden of the house….keeping up the huge yard, house projects, finding someone to house sit every time we have to leave….it has definitely been stressful, but it’s also very emotional for us. We moved into this little house right after getting married, got our first puppy, put hours and hours of love and care into it, lost our beloved kitty Timon, and had both of our amazing children while living in this house. There are so many memories attached to it! We knew we’d have to let go eventually, but it’s coming sooner than we expected. Nevertheless, we still feel that this is the right timing and have spent a considerable amount of time in prayer about it.

This coming weekend we’ll have a work day to work on house projects to prepare it for the market. My parents will be coming to help. Matt’s parents arrive from Rwanda next week, we are gearing up for the Liberty Lake Community sales the following weekend to sell a lot of our stuff before moving, and we plan on moving out and hopefully putting the house up for sale by the time we leave for our California/Seattle trip June 22^nd. It’s going to be a whirlwind! As far as where we will be living, an amazing couple from Bible study has offered for us to live in their spacious daylight basement until we are ready to leave for Indonesia.

Will you pray with us for peace during all of the transitions and that we’ll be able to get it all done before we leave?

Please also pray that God would be preparing the perfect buyer for our house and that it would sell quickly.
  

The view every morning from our back patio





Swimming in my cousin Michelle's pool!



Blake playing in the water at the Fountain Hills Splash Pad

  

Blake and daddy at the Country Club Pool

  

One day we went to an adorable train park they have in Scottsdale



Riding the little train