Sunday School

Our fall Sunday school rotation has begun. After our fellowship meal, we have our Sunday school hour at 2pm. There are two adult classes. One is taught by Lala downstairs in the church room. David teaches the other one around the table in the dining room upstairs. There are also two children’s classes (one not pictured) and the teen class. Tim is teaching the teen class on the major gifts given to us in the Gospel.

Getting to know more people in France

We enjoyed two opportunities to host people in our home this week. Francois has just arrived from Taiwan to study here for a year. Tim picked him up at the airport on Wednesday, and then we enjoyed breakfast with him and Wilfried, one of our "regulars" at church who helped Francois to find an apartment and has really done a lot to help him get settled in. We have two other new students from Germany who have just arrived in Bordeaux to begin their programs, and who are already beginning to get involved in our church life, attending our church meetings and helping out with the distribution that is still underway. Please keep praying for visitors to come as a result of the church invitations/tracts that have been distributed in three more dormitory villages.

Today we enjoyed lunch with Priscilla, who has been attending our church for more than a month, along with Dalice and her son Diego. Dalice and Diego arrived in France just at the end of the summer from Puerto Rico, and Diego is the other non-French child in Micaiah's class. Micaiah and Diego have a great deal of sympathy for one another in their new language setting, even though they also have different mother tongues. We enjoyed getting to know Dalice and Diego more and are looking forward to developing our relationship with them as the school year progresses. Priscilla, who is originally from Mexico, was able to fellowship with Dalice in Spanish.

Nine Years and Counting

I thank God that on September 23, 2000, on a rainy afternoon in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ruth Renée Pahnke said, "I do." I am a better man because of her. I am happy to rise up and praise her (Proverbs 31:28).

Here are the vows we wrote together, memorized and quoted to each other on our wedding day.

I, Timothy, take you, Ruth,

To be my companion and my wife by covenant;

And I do solemnly promise before God and these witnesses

To love you as Christ loved the Church,

Giving Himself for her:

To be your head, even as Christ is the head of the Church,

Leading her, protecting her, and providing for her,

Both materially and spiritually:

To strive by God’s grace and empowerment

To dwell always in harmony with you,

Being patient and kindhearted and humble in spirit,

Not rendering evil for evil, or insult for insult,

But blessing instead;

To dwell with you according to knowledge,

Giving honor unto you as unto a weaker vessel

Whether in plenty or in want,

In health or in sickness,

In joy or in sorrow,

Until God by death shall separate us.

I, Ruth, take you, Timothy,

To be my companion and my husband by covenant;

And I do solemnly promise before God and these witnesses

To reverence and honor you,

As the Church doth reverence and honor Christ as her head,

To submit unto you in all things,

Even as the Church is subject unto Christ,

To strive by God’s grace and empowerment

To dwell always in harmony with you,

To be patient and kindhearted and humble in spirit,

Not rendering evil for evil, or insult for insult,

But blessing instead;

To look well to the ways of our household

In all chastity, meekness and faithfulness,

That I may be one in whom your heart may safely trust

Whether in plenty or in want,

In health or in sickness,

In joy or in sorrow,

Until God by death shall separate us.

The distribution has begun!

Last night (09-18-09) as part of our student evening, eight students and I set out to begin the yearly university distribution. The university-owned dormitories are divided into six "villages." We began with Village 1 and surprised ourselves at how quickly it went. By the time we are finished, we will have slid several thousand invitations under doors or wedged into doorways. Please pray that God will bless these efforts with fruit for His glory.

Invitations are folded

Thanks to the many helping hands, the 9,000 invitations to our church are now folded! We plan to use these invitations in a general student distribution that is done every fall. This coming Friday night, we hope to begin the task of distributing with the students who attend our bi-weekly student meetings. Please pray that God will give us many contacts through this effort.

Evangilizing at Stalingrad

Last Saturday morning (9/12/09) we took the tram and, with another individual from our church, joined a few believers from a sister church on the right bank of the river for about two hours of street evangelism. About six of us sang while another six passed out tracts and sought out gospel conversations. One of the benefits of such open, direct evangelisation is that it helps to liberate you from the fear of people that creeps in naturally over time. We were glad we could sing praises to Jesus Christ in such a public venue and share our love and faith in Christ with those who stopped, talked and took our literature.

Stalingrad is the name of the square that is just over the bridge from the main part of Bordeaux. It serves as a transportation hub for the tram and buses headed east and north.

Tracts in hand

On Wednesday (the children's weekly day off of school) we drove down into the mountainous Basque region of Spain to pick up 9,000 tracts to use for a distribution among the new influx of students to the area. We were graciously hosted for lunch by the Juan Alvarez family. They are Mexican, missionaries sent out from their home country to minister in Spain. They have served as a team with the Andy Bownikowski family for more than 10 years. They are humble, unpretentious and full of wisdom. We had a delightful time with them, sitting around their skinny table in their third-floor apartment, sharing experiences and pegging them with questions. Though both their native land and target field are different from either of ours, we benefitted greatly. We are now hoping they will pay us a visit sometime later in the year.

On the way home, we got off the highway to see some of the sights of the coastline in San Sebastian. The north shore of the Spanish coast is truly beautiful and an eloquent testimony to its Creator. We got home both tired and refreshed ... and with 9,000 tracts that will have to be folded by hand! Anybody want to help?

The Juan Alvarez family

El pollo was mucho fantastico!

The city of San Sebastian

The beautiful coastline of northern Spain

The tracts issue a general invitation to and explanation of the church. They are beautifully printed with the picture of our building on the front to help with visual recognition.

A visit to the end of the road

Paul wrote to the Colossians, “We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.” That was his goal: present every man complete in Christ. Once a man was there, Paul’s goal for that individual was accomplished. The undershepherd has finished his part of the task as he hands the sheep over to the Chief Shepherd.

I got an intimate impression of that event when the eldest member of the church here in Pessac was called home by the Chief Shepherd on August 21, 2009. It was unexpected and sudden. His wife heard him fall, but by the time she got to him, he had died of a heart attack. René Rottier was 86, but in relatively good health. Another leader in the church, his wife (Lala and Ando) and I were there within an hour. René’s body was still lying in the hallway, since the family doctor who had come had been unable to move him by himself. We helped move him to the bed and a few minutes later Lala and I dressed him in his Sunday clothes. It was sobering to dress a warm but lifeless body whose head and arms yielded involuntarily to the pull of gravity. One thing was clear: René was no longer there.

While I was left alone with René's body, a thought hit me with unusual force: this is what it's all about. Yes, this cooling, stiffening corpse is what it is all about! This task is completed. This sheep has been returned to the Chief Shepherd and our ministry is no longer needed. And now to the others: "We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me." I pulled his hands together and folded them across the motionless chest. This is the goal: present every man complete in Christ. René finished strong. May there be many more. And may I be myself among their number.

Here Tim is lead the singing at the funeral (held on August 26). Later he preached on "Christ's Counsel for Troubled Hearts" from John 14:1-6.

The funeral home workers lower the casket into the tomb.

We were very grateful that Tim's dad was able to return to help minister to the family. Here you see him witnessing the lowering of the casket with René's widow, Marcelle, and son, Daniel.

The French have a tradition of tossing a dried flower onto the casket after it has been lowered into the tomb.

Remembering France's Heritage: L'affaire de la rue Saint-Jacques

On September 4, 1557, somewhere between 300 and 400 hundred protestants gathered to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a house located just behind the Sorbonne on the rue St. Jacques in Paris. (It was also on this street in 1218 that the Paris base of the Dominican Order was established. This is why the Dominicans were called Jacobins in Paris.) The worshipers were discovered by some student priests who notified others and soon the house was surrounded by a Catholic crowd. The crowd lit fires along the streets leading away from the house so that no one could escaped unnoticed. Some managed to fight their way out, but about 135 people remained in the house, mostly women, when the soldiers arrived. As the newly taken prisoners were led to jail, the mob gathered around them, hurling not only insults, but stones and excrement at the captives while they ripped off their clothes and beat them without mercy.

La rue Saint-Jacques

The instigators of this persecution were never tried, but between 100 and 120 Protestants were incarcerated and seven were executed by the state, including one noblewoman. Antoine de Chandieu, at that time one of the pastors in Paris said, “On all sides, psalms were being sung and praises to God resounded throughout all the [prison], sufficient evidence of the singular assurance of innocence that they carried in their hearts.”

La rue Saint-Jacques as it is today

First day of school in France: ACCOMPLISHED!

We are giving thanks to God for the way He has answered our prayers (and the prayers of so many of you) according to our desires for this first day of school. The children both woke up quite excited about their new adventure, and they demonstrated absolutely no hesitation about being left there this morning. Their school schedule is 8:30 until 11:30, when we get to pick them up for a two-hour lunch, returning them at 1:30 and then finally picking them up for the day at 4:30. They only have school on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. (There is no school on Wednesdays or on the weekend.) Miriam did immediately break into tears upon seeing me when I went to pick her up for lunch, but the tears quickly dried up as we were asking her brother how much he understood of what was said in French, and she inserted enthusiastically, "I understood one word: goûter!" (For all of you non-French speakers, that means "snack!" ;-)

We were grateful to have the two-hour lunch period for a rehearsal of the morning's events, and for re-energizing for the afternoon. When the time came for them to go back for the afternoon, Miriam had no trouble at all walking right back onto the playground where all the other children were already enjoying themselves. We were pleased to see her greet us with a big grin when we gathered with the other parents outside her classroom window at 4:30. As to Micaiah, he had nothing but good to say about his day. His teacher does speak a little bit of English, and she was therefore able to help him from time to time. Other than that, he caught on pretty quickly to the art of watching what the other kids were doing around him in order to know what to do next. (In fact, we found him at lunch time running across the courtyard with a group of boys from his class towards the lunchroom line--where some children do stay for the lunch period--as he had become quite the expert at the game of "following the leader".) He was able to give us a detailed report of everything they did today, and the teacher confirmed to Tim that things seemed to have gone very smoothly for him. We are grateful that he will be receiving some extra language help during class hours through a program the school system offers to foreign students.

So that's pretty much it for day 1. We know (and have already seen in some small ways) that the school year won't be without its challenges, but we are grateful for the way the Lord has led, and are committed to pursuing this avenue for at least one year to see what the Lord has for us through it.

Click here to see a slideshow of some of the kids' first-day experiences.

La Rentrée !

Tomorrow is a big day in the life of the Bixby household. For the very first time since our first child was born six years ago, we are sending our children away from our home and into the big, wide world without their Mommy and Daddy! Tomorrow is the French rentrée. It literally means a “return”, and is commonly used in French to designate the end of summer vacation and the beginning of a new school year. We have been trying to prepare mentally and emotionally for this day for many months now, and it is hard to believe the time has actually come.

In planning for our enculturation into French life, one of the aspects we had to consider as a family is how we would choose to educate our children. While Tim and I were both home schooled for most of our lives (I attended Christian school during my elementary years), we have prayerfully considered this possibility of placing our children into the French public school system, at least for these initial years while they are young, for a long time now. Philosophically, being a part of the same educational system as are most of those to whom we plan to minister seemed like a wise move. Not only would it allow us to better understand the life and struggles of our French brothers and sisters in Christ, it would also open a door of opportunity for getting to know many unsaved French people for the purpose of developing redemptive relationships with a people who are naturally very private and hard to get to know. In addition, there is the aspect of French enculturation for our children. I have especially seen the need for this immersion into an all-French context in the intervening time since we arrived two months ago. While our children have adapted very well and are quite content in their new French home, even having begun in this short time to learn bits of the language, I am confident that this educational process, especially in the area of language-learning, will greatly advance our enculturation goals.

The process of actually getting our children into the school system has been a bit more complicated and involved than we had originally expected, mostly due to the timing of our arrival. When we first went to register our children at the town hall early in July, we were told that the (neighborhood) school our children should be attending was already full and therefore we would have to be transferred to another school in the district. That announcement threw us into a whirlwind of uncertainty that was not completely resolved until just yesterday. We were kept on a waiting list at our neighborhood school but told that our chances were slim of being admitted. We also had friends here in our church who wanted desperately to help us get special permission to send our children to their children’s school in another town. Therefore, for an extended period of time we were left wondering which one of the three schools our children would ultimately be allowed to attend, and we had to patiently wait for our requests to get through the system during a month of national vacation in which very few French people actually work regular hours. Finally on Monday of this week, with the other two doors apparently closed, we interviewed with the directors of our third-choice school (the one to which the town hall had recommended we transfer), and were settling into the idea of them going to that school. While we were at our interviews on Monday, we received a telephone message on our home phone that there was now room at the original school in our neighborhood into which our children should have been inscribed. So a mere 48 hours before their first class, the decision was finalized that our children would be able to attend our neighborhood school. And that is how we have now come to Wednesday, the day before the rentrée, and our children are finally set and ready to go to school at École Jules FERRY de Pessac tomorrow morning at 8:30.

As a mother, I have to confess to a little anxiety about this whole process. Over the last few weeks I have viewed a number of my stateside Facebook friends’ pictures of their children’s first day back to school. These pictures have revealed the smiling faces of neatly dressed children, many of them headed off to meet their Christian teachers and Christian friends at their Christian schools. Others of them sit at a table in their kitchen or family room with siblings close by, hovering over their parents’ choice of Christian school textbooks in their home school. And all of them are studying in their native tongue, English, and will therefore be able to focus on learning their course material and not just trying to figure out how to survive in a foreign context. I must own up to a little bit of jealousy and have occasionally wondered if I am depriving my children of the opportunities I should be giving them. But Tim and I both remain convinced that God has led us to this point, and He has answered our prayers by directing us to École Jules FERRY.

Our children themselves, to this point at least, have not displayed the least bit of anxiety and are really quite excited about their first day of school tomorrow. While I am conscious of the fact that one day of school could change their perspective, I am very pleased and excited by their eager anticipation and am praying that God will continue to keep their excitement level high. Will you pray with us that God would keep Micaiah and Miriam safe and secure in His care, that their minds would quickly adapt to the new language and environment, and that God would accomplish all His purposes for us as a family through this new adventure? In the future, we will need God’s wisdom to know how long this form of education will be best for our children, and if and when we should switch to home schooling. For the present we are convinced that this is what God has for us, and I am claiming these verses that I read just this week in Psalm 121: “The LORD will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul. The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever” (vv. 7-8, NASB).