July & August Update 2024

Kim Dvorak
Oct 2, 2024
12 min read

Formation Journey - Upcoming - Prayer Requests - Photo Dump

I decided to start writing this post while Rett was overseas at the end of July (which is early as with my current schedule I have started writing the update for a given month after that month has concluded), it wasn't quite finished when Rett returned, so it felt only fair to include his trip in this update, and then the end of my last semester of the counseling program took over, so I decided to lump everything together in one post for July and August, enjoy! Rett's part of the story is here.

July was filled with a lot of book-work. Rett spent a significant amount of time preparing to facilitate 8 sessions and a devotional on Romans 8-11 and I completed the bulk of my summer seminary requirements while managing logistics for our biannual EMSL (Essentials of Multiplying Servant Leaders) training at work. When I finally dropped Rett off at the airport near the end of July, with all these other tasks behind me, I breathed a tiny sigh of relief, knowing that much of the work we had set out to accomplish was behind us. (Of course, this was followed by an even bigger sigh of relief after his plane landed and he got settled into his hotel!) Now, Rett is back in the States, satisfied with his trip (You will have to sign in, please let me know if you have any difficulties) and excited to start partnership development for full-time ministry! Rett and I will be working together and with other BEE World staff to equip Church leaders in under-resourced areas of the world with biblical and theological training. In the United States, we will be working with seminary students, churches, and lay leaders to equip them to train others and disciple others in non-traditional educational environments.

If you are interested in supporting this ministry consider making a tax-deductible donation. I am still about $700 away from being fully funded for my upcoming Women's Ministry trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, and it would be so special to me if you would pray about joining me in ministry to these wonderful ladies by helping to cover some of the cost of the trip or connecting me with people who would be willing and able to participate in the ministry financially.

If you would be interested in joining in the ministry through facilitating the course materials yourself, consider signing up for our next training event in Colorado!

(If you ever have any issues, feel free to reach out to me directly at rettandkimdvorak@gmail.com or administration@beeworld.net)

How is Life?

We got to celebrate the 4th of July, pulling weeds at a friend's house, roasting marshmallows, grilling, and enjoying the probably-not-city-sponsored fireworks nearby, before diving into preparations for work events, school, and travel. July was a mostly "chill" month for the kids and we all got to enjoy watching the parts of the summer X-Games we missed while working on school and travel preparations. It's become important to us to be able to spend time together as a family, even when we feel like life is being consumed by writing and studying, and we've found that setting up our workstations in the living room and watching something that doesn't require too much attention, helps facilitate a sense of fun and relaxation, while also allowing Rett and I to complete needed work. It's not for everyone, but it works for us, and kind of reminds me of hanging out in the study lounge at college, but that's another story.

For Rett, July brought a lot of hurried travel preparations. It really wasn't that much, but I think we were both used to planning international travel 6-months in advance, so doing most of the preparations in one month felt like moving at warp speed! Below are my highlights of important to-dos when preparing to travel internationally:

Be sure to leave time to get a passport (6 months if you don't already have one)
Apply for a visa (if you need one, check the consulate website of the country you plan to go to)
Get up to date on all necessary vaccinations and recommended medications if needed (a friend recommended Passport Health and we've had very positive experiences with them in the past.)
Buy appropriate clothing (Many countries have different clothing standards from the USA and it is good to look as much like a local as possible. As an example, jeans are not the norm for many countries in Asia, but hiking pants or khakis are a good stand-in for casual attire.)
Acquire a Universal Travel Adapter (we have one similar to this), because outlets are not always the same in other countries!
Make sure you know how you are going to get international cell phone coverage (We use T-Mobile because international calling is included in the basic plan, yay!)
Pack light if possible (it's easier to navigate airports and local transportation if you don't have more bags than hands)
Leave valuables at home (it's easy to not loose your laptop if you don't bring it)
Bring paper copies of everything! Bring a copy of your passport, flight itinerary, hotel information, boarding passes, maps of the area around your hotel, etc. (You don't want to rely on your phone always being there for you, and having a copy of your passport always helps if you - may God forbid - lose your passport in another country.)
Finally, do your research on where you are going (We got information on how to use the local ride-sharing service and the location of the closest grocery story to the hotel before Rett left on his trip, which made things a lot easier after arriving in-country. Research might also highlight additional safety precautions to take depending on where you are going. Have fun and be safe!)

Ryan and Cecilia spent this month relaxing and practicing some very low-key skateboarding and hiking before school starts back up again. They also started a new evening prayer and Bible reading routine with us that is going well and inspiring some good conversations. I'll admit that our prayer and Bible reading routines with the kids have been very hit-and-miss as we navigate bad attitudes and tight schedules. The advice that has been most encouraging to me in this long season of discipleship has been to be gracious to yourself and your kids, try new things, don't be afraid to adjust your efforts to better fit your family, and it's ok to take a break and try again a little later--kids mature, our patience develops, and everyone's expectations adjust when we take a little step back--be gentle and don't give up.

Finally, River (our cat) has been spending the summer lounging next to our portable AC. She is excited for the cooler temperatures of Fall, now steadily approaching.

Formation Journey

At the very beginning of August, I finally ended up sharing a devotional at work. As the person who manages our devotional scheduling, I have been anticipating giving a devotional for about a year now, but I really wanted to save my own spot for a time when it really didn’t work for anyone else. There have been a few times over the last twelve months when I’ve gotten very close to a particular Thursday without a devotion scheduled, and each time I started thinking and praying about what I would like to share, and I would just come up completely blank. Thankfully, each time, some wonderful person, would step in and save me from my writer’s block of devotional preparation, that is until early August. During all the waiting, I came up with a lot of good ideas to fall back on. I really like Leviticus, especially the meaning and symbolism in each of the sacrifices. One can never go wrong with a deep dive of the Lord’s Prayer, or Psalm 23, or Romans 8, but I didn't use any of these either because while my Rett was overseas, something clicked, I wanted to share about waiting.

While Rett was overseas the kids and I were immersed in a sense of waiting for Rett to return home (which I kind of expected). However, as I received messages from my husband that he was greatly enjoying the experience of facilitating Romans and that things seemed to be going well, I realized that something I have been waiting for, for a very long time appears to be approaching.

Interestingly, when my husband and I met at our Christian High School, we had no thoughts about doing any kind of vocational ministry, and due to a particularly traumatic parting of ways that I witnessed as a child in my first church family, I had decided that one of my criteria for marriage would be that my potential future husband would have no aspirations of any kind towards vocational ministry. My heart’s desire at the time was to serve God from the back row. However, many years later, when no one at our church was willing and able to continue leading the weekly Bible studies that we had enjoyed, Rett and I volunteered to temporarily fill the void. Through that Bible study, we had the privilege of watching God move in the hearts of our friends and fellow church-goers, changing the trajectory of their lives, and our lives as well.

To be in the midst of God working in the lives of others through his word and fellowship with other Christians felt life-giving and meaningful. I felt that I didn’t just want to do this in my few free moments after work, I wanted this to be my work, and it soon became obvious that Rett felt the same. In what seemed like the blink of an eye (but was actually few years), we had connected with a mission organization, visited the area of the world that we felt God was calling us to, enrolled in seminary, and moved across the country (top to bottom) to follow the path that we believed the Lord had laid out for us, and then COVID happened, and all of our plans unraveled. What now? We entered a season of waiting.

Waiting should not be a foreign concept for God’s people. Noah and his family waited seven days inside the ark before the flood came and were on the ark for another 371 days before touching dry land again (Gen 7-8). It was 25 years after God promised that Abraham would be a great nation before his son Isaac was born (Gen 15-18, 21). Joseph served God faithfully for over 20 years before he saw the fulfillment of the dream God had given him (Gen 27-45). The Israelites had to wait more than a lifetime to be delivered from slavery in Egypt (Gen 15:13, Ex 12:40-41). Moses waited in Midian for 40 years before he was called back to Egypt to fulfill the desire God had placed in his heart many years prior (Ex 7:7, Acts 7:23-30). After leaving Egypt, the Israelites had to wait 40 days for Moses and Josua to return from Mt. Sinai (Ex 24:13-18) and later had to wait 40 years to enter the Promised Land (though this was due to their own lack of faith)(Num 14:34). After being anointed as the future king of Israel, David waited around 22 years, many of them spent fleeing from Saul, before being recognized as king over all Israel (1 Sam 16 - 2 Sam 5:4). After being carried into exile, the Israelites waited 70 years to return (Jer 29:10), and by the time of John the Baptist God’s people had been waiting roughly 400 years without a prophet, with decades spent under Roman rule waiting for a deliverer. The incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus fulfilled God’s promise for a Savior which the world had been waiting for since nearly the beginning of creation, and even after Jesus’ coming marked the beginning of the story of redemption, we still wait in anticipation for the completion of this redemption at his second coming.

If we doubt that the church is any less subject to waiting in our walk with God, consider that God chose to have the disciples wait in Jerusalem for 10 days before the coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1-2), and that Peter, John, Paul, James, Philip, and many of other early followers of Christ did a lot of their waiting in prison. Waiting is an integral part of following God, so how do we wait well, both for Jesus’ second coming and for the good and godly things that we desire that are currently out of reach?

While walking through this experience of waiting, I have found biblical narratives in both the Old and New Testament to be encouraging, cautionary, and informative of what it looks like to wait with faithfulness. At work, I had the joy of exploring the following with my coworkers:

Moses: Exodus 2:11-3:10

Aaron: Exodus 32

David: 1 Samuel 26-27

Saul: 1 Samuel 13:7-14

Religious Leaders: Matthew 23

Simeon and Anna: Luke 2:22-40

I am encouraged by the examples of people who waited well and continued to honor God and obey his commands as best they could within their limited situations, accepting that they did not know how or if God would provide a way for his promise to be fulfilled in their lifetimes, but trusting him all the more.

In our family's period of waiting, we experienced a lot of grief and frustration, something that is not foreign to the people in these passages. In all of this, through walking with God and reading the stories of his people, I found that once I was able to let go of my frustration, anxiety, and a mindset that asked if I was waiting because I had failed God, if my desires toward vocational ministry had been wrong, or if God simply did not share my sense of urgency (that last one is probably true, and a good thing). It was then that I was able to focus on just him; and on learning what it looked like to be faithful with what I had been given and to care for the people close to me well.

Looking back, I can see what a blessing this season of waiting has been to me and my family. Moving overseas would have been an enormous and expensive undertaking at this time in our lives, and I am beginning to realize that it is a great mercy that the option is not available at this moment, all while still hoping for this to become a possibility in the future. Staying stateside is clearly a better fit for our kids’ educational needs at this time, and it has allowed us to be present for the potential and real needs of our extended family as they have arisen over the last few years. In addition during this time of waiting, we learned that the ministry we had intended to pursue, focusing on support and outreach, would likely not have been the best fit for our area of gifting which tends more toward administration and equipping. This season of waiting has allowed me to mature in my faith as well as every other area of life and has helped me better understand my role in the body of Christ.

More recently, I realized how much more difficult Rett’s momentary absence would have been even last year compared with now. Looking at the growth in maturity of my children and my increasing level of comfort with school, work, and home responsibilities, I can see God’s kindness towards our family. All this to say that I now see that waiting, even difficult waiting can be for our benefit. I am learning to trust God in a new way, to lean on the fact that he is not slow, but rather patient.

My hope for you after sharing all this, is that you will be encouraged by biblical example and my own testimony to give all of your anxieties, frustrations, and griefs to God in your seasons of waiting. That you will rest in his goodness and presence. And that you will pursue each small, perhaps unseen, perhaps painful, act of faith and faithfulness that is in your reach while you wait.

Upcoming

Click here to view details about our upcoming work with BEE World in my update for July/August. There is no cost or additional emails connected to creating a personal login, it simply helps us speak more freely, with less concern about who can view the information we share.

Prayer Requests

Thank you so much for your prayers for Rett and the students doing the Romans seminar! All travel went smoothly, the students were engaged with the material, and Rett was able to prepare to a level he was satisfied with. I am told it was a very encouraging time for all!

I am traveling to Dallas to represent BEE World at the Evangelical Missiological Society National Conference tomorrow, and hopefully get connected with students and other other educational institutions in the process. Please pray for safe travels and that God would work in and through these conversations for his work and glory.

Rett and I are pursuing partnership development to support future full-time ministry work with BEE World. We are truly excited to connect with people for whom the ministry of equipping Church leaders for Christian service is meaningful and are excited to partner with us in this work. If this is you, we would love if you would pray about getting involved through financial, physical, or other means. If this is not you, we would be so thankful if you would pray that God would connect us with the people he wants to be involved in this work.

As always, thank you so much for your prayers for our family and your encouragement. We wouldn’t be here without you and we want you to know that we truly feel blessed by your continued involvement with our family. We are praying for you too, so if you have any specific requests, let us know!