God is Good!

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been witness to the abundant goodness of Yahweh. So today I wanted to share with you a little bit about how good my God is...

As most of you know, I have been struggling with money over the past couple of months. Because of that, debts have stacked up and any and all money that comes in goes into that to be able to pay them off as well as maintain my monthly rent and food and every other cost. I thought I would be smart and plan a bit of a budget and I figured it'd be good to have a some money on the side for entertainment. Thinking along those lines, I had found a cheap airline ticket to go out to the Netherlands and visit my girlfriend, Maartje, for awhile. I reveled in this thought! But I know that it would be a smart thing to consult with my leader at the YWAM base that I am staying in and see what he thought of me going out to the Netherlands to spend some time with Maartje. And he suggested what I already knew deep down, "All of the money that God gives you should go into paying off your debts and keeping up on the monthly rent." So I was kind of down in the dumps...

Bruno, one of my very close friends/leader at the base, came up to me and spent some time talking and praying with me. That helped, but I was still sad and moping around a bit. So I decided to take what Bruno had said to me to heart and apply it to my life: "If you honour God, He will honour you." God had placed Junior, the base leader, over my life for a reason and I should listen to his council. So I did. I told Yahweh, "Okay, I will listen to you and your guidance. I want what you want for my life, not my own desires." So I gave it over to Him. What happened next it actually caught me off guard...

Maartje had spent a night with a couple of her good friends from her university and they were talking about having a triple date with all of their boyfriends. Well Maartje brought up how I was in Spain and we didn't have any money to bring me over to the Netherlands. You know what her friends said? "We'd love to pay for his ticket to come out here!" Wow! I really didn't expect that. It caught me completely off guard.

So here I am, in the Netherlands, typing this up, telling you all of this. Now you might be telling yourself, "That wasn't God, that was just Maartje's friends being nice." And you are right, it is her friends being nice. But I give all the credit to Yahweh. For I believe that He is the writer of all that is good in this world and that the devil is the father of all lies. These are my beliefs and you don't have to agree with me, but if you want to explore a life with your Creator who loves you and all He wants is to know you and draw you in close and embrace you, seek and you will find. Taste and see, for the Lord is good.

I also want to apologize on behalf of the church and any other Christian or follower of Yahweh that has hurt anyone reading this. Whoever you may be, God is not defined by His people. Come and know Him personally and you shall find that He is good and He loves you and no matter how far you run, He will be chasing after you.

Thank you for reading and know that I love you!

Jack

Faithfulness

Hello beloved family!

So it has been another two weeks and here comes another blog post. Are you ready for it? Got your popcorn, drink to accompany that white puffy stuff, your favourite seat? Good. Here we go then...

God is very good and I want to share with how He is a good God.

I had wanted to go to Madrid and visit my friend Johnny who lives out there. I was praying about it, asking God if I could go, and someone from the YWAM base out in Madrid comes to our base for a couple of days. I ask him if I could catch a ride to Madrid with him and he said sure. (That was an adventure in itself because his car ended up breaking down, fuel pump was leaking fuel like mad. So we got a tow truck and he took a bus because there wasn't enough seats in the tow truck. The bus he was on broke down and it was just an adventure!) So making it to Johnny's house was such a huge blessing. He is a musician and has his own basement studio at his parents house and is a very good producer/mixer. So I asked him if we couldn't record my vocals for the cover that I am doing with my friend back in Canada and he said sure. And it was very fun! I love singing (but not in the conventional way, for I was screaming, you see) and it was just very fun to record my vocals for this cover. The song is "Isaiah (The Willing)," by For Today, if you want to check it out (WARNING: It is metal, so listen if you like heavy guitar, drums, bass and vocals). And then things just started to explode after that...

It went good: one of his friends who is a very good guitarist, commented on a video that Johnny posted on Facebook and wanted me in his band! So I am in contact with him and we shall see if this is a door that God has opened for me. God then provided a number of people saying that they wanted to support me financially and invest in God's work here in Spain. Johnny's family also blessed me with €60 and I was able to buy my train ticket back to Cáceres with that money. And then it went bad...

I got on the train going back to Cáceres and I turned on my computer to watch a movie on the ride home and this folder with a question mark popped up and nothing happened... I searched up what was happening on my iPhone and I had to wait till I got back home to fix it. When I got back home, I tried to fix it and couldn't. So I took it into a Mac store to get it fixed and they said that the hard drive was broken and couldn't be fixed. Shoot... Luckily I didn't have anything on there that I was really mad that I lost, maybe just the photos from Africa, but nothing else. So I needed to buy a new hard drive but didn't have any money to do so. So I just prayed and put it in the Lord's hand. Then what happened next is a huge blessing.

I was talking with Natio (one of my leaders) and telling him about how I was searching for hard drives but that I didn't have any money to buy one or anything. And he said, "Here, lets go right now to go buy you a new one." Wow! Okay, so we went and bought a new 1TB (that is 1000GB) hard drive for my Macbook. Amazing! Such a huge blessing! Went home to install it and it wasn't showing up on my Macbook as connected. Weird... So I took it in the next day, and the guy said that it was the hard drive cable that connects the hard drive to the logic board. He said that it would cost €30 to fix and I didn't have that much... Couldn't buy an external case because they didn't support 1TB hard drives. He then proceeded to say that he might have a cable at the store and that he would try to find one and install it. I asked how much: €15! Well I had that much money! So he told me to come back later that day and when I did it was fixed! Oh yeah baby! God is good! So now I have a new, 1TB hard drive in my computer, God is very good! But not only that, but the guy formatted the hard drive, so I didn't need to do that when I got back home. And! He also put three new pads on the bottom of my Macbook because three of mine were missing. All for €15! Wow, I am flabbergasted by God's goodness...

But through it all, I learned to take better care of my stuff. Because I know that I wasn't doing a very good job of caring for it as I could have been. I also made a commitment to stop torrenting music and movies, because I used to do it like it was nothing. But it is illegal, for one, and I am also a musician and am in the entertainment business and if I am wanting other people to purchase any music I would produce, but I don't purchase other artists' music, I am just a hypocrite. So I have stopped that with this new hard drive.

But I just want to finish on the note that if you are faithful and honour God and you give things up to Him, He will reward you with things even greater than what you had before. For He is a good God and a good Father!

I am still in need of more financial support to be able to stay here in Spain. I am in a lot of debt with the base here in Cáceres and need to pay it off and I need your help to be able to do so. But you won't be investing in me, for I am man and that would not be a very wise idea. No, you'll be investing your money in the kingdom of God and it will be used to work out the great commission, to reach the gospel the Spanish people. And that can only happen with your help! So if you want to support me financially, you can do it through PayPal (address: jack. reggin@gmail.com) or contact me for more details as to how you can do so. But I also need prayer support. Prayer points:
- doors to be opened over the coming months to go to a whole bunch of conferences that are happening and are quite important for what I want to be doing here in Spain. I need money that I don't have.
- our outreach team that is making their way now from Portugal in the central Spain and then going to other places in Spain. Just for protection on their travels and that they can grow with one another and with the churches that they are helping out.
- I am working on getting a new visa and I need a miracle to come about in the coming months. I have papers that will expire eventually and it is a very complicated situation. Pray that it all gets sorted out and that whatever God's will is, that it happens.

Thank you so much for your support and look forward to updating you as to how it is going on in another two weeks!!

Love you guys!

Trials, Tribulation and Learning

Hello beloved family!

I just want to start this post off by saying that I am sorry! Oh so sorry for not updating you for over a whole month already! This is my fault for not keeping to my schedule that I posted and it is something that God is working on in my life: discipline. So I humbly ask for your forgiveness and I will be posting bi-weekly from here on out! Without further adieu, my last month's story...

As the title says, I have gone through some very hard times in my life. I am in a place of debt right now, owing money to the YWAM base here in Cáceres as well as owing money to MasterCard and it doesn't seem to be going away... Because of this, it has put me into a very interesting place in my life. For I have never been here (I am sure that all of you can agree, being in debt is NOT somewhere we like to be nor want to be!) and I hope that I am not here for long. But with not being here, in a place of debt or not being able to pay my own ways and am living off of financial support that others give me, He has been able to teach me things that I never would've learned otherwise. The most important of them is to praise Him in all times, good and bad.

To tell a quick story, I went back to Canada for Christmas! Hooray! My wonderful parents purchased a ticket for me to come and visit for a couple of weeks and it was a wonderful time! I got to see lots of family, visit some church friends and started writing a song with one of my friends who is an amazing drummer. It was a wonderful time there being able to see snow again and freeze my butt off in -30°C  weather. I had a return ticket, and it came to the date that I would be leaving for Spain once more. Now this flight wouldn't just be get on a plane and hooray! I'm in Spain! No. This was sleeping in the Toronto airport, staying in the New York airport for 9 hours and then being in Madrid, where I then had to take a train to Cáceres to back to my home. What a trek. Especially in the Toronto airport.

I've never slept in an airport before, so I figured that it would be a good idea to find a locker to be able to put my stuff in for the night so that I would be able to get some sleep before I had to wake up to get in a lineup for my connecting flight. Good idea, no? Well I didn't have enough money to be able to pay for the locker... So that sucked. But amongst it all, being in debt, not having enough support coming in monthly, being alone in an airport close to midnight, all of it just came crumbling down and I felt abandoned. Knew I wasn't, but that didn't matter, all that I knew was emotions. And I cried, didn't care who saw me, I felt alone, very alone. Miraculously, I messaged my girlfriend, Maartje, and she woke up from her sleep (which doesn't ever happen if I were to message her in the middle of the night), so that was God right there, but I was too blind at the time to see the help He gave me. And what did He tell me when I was crying out to Him? "You have to praise me, Jack, all the time; right now, when you are in a desert place, or later, when you are on a mountain top." So that's what I did, I started worshipping Him. And guess what? Peace. Peace came over me and nothing changed except for my heart, which is quite a lot! For God wasn't/isn't after my situation, but after my heart. And it was a really good lesson! Learning how to praise Him in trials and tribulation. So I am thankful for the lesson, as well as much more!

So I have gone through some interesting times, and now I am here alone in the YWAM base in Cáceres. We just sent out an outreach team from the DTS and I was not able to be on it. Not going to say that that is unfortunate, because I know that there are awesome things awaiting me in these coming months and I am already seeing it. This gives me a great opportunity to make my music a lot more seriously. So I am practicing guitar a lot and I am going to be practicing bass a lot more as well and my singing and everything! As well, I am going to be taking it upon myself to learn Dutch so I can speak with Maartje and her family in their native tongue. I am excited for these coming months! I hope that more opportunities come up for adventure.

As I mentioned in this post, I am in dire need of support financially. I do not get paid by YWAM on any basis, it is volunteer work, I am a missionary and I am in need of your help. Whatever you can do, even though monthly payments are the best way (I have a special set up that you can do for monthly payments that makes it that you are able to get a tax receipt for donating to me and makes it easy for you and for me! So message me if you are interested in going that direction), but one time donations are just as good, for like I said, I am in a lot of debt and need to get out of it and I can only do that with your help. Here is my PayPal address if you want to wire me money over the internet: jack.reggin@gmail.com (you can also email me with that same address if you have any questions or anything). And send any cash or cheque donations to this address:
Project Funding Office
PO Box 57100 RPO East Hastings
Vancouver, BC V5K 5G6

Thank you for sticking with me through all of this, in my failings and my successes! I love being able to share my life with you guys!

Blessings and love to you my family!