Hannah's Birthday Party!

We can’t believe that Hannah is one year old! Time has flown by. We had a fun time reflecting on this past year and the day that Hannah was born. She has grown so fast. We were planning on celebrating Hannah’s birthday at the park but it was raining so we had to go with plan B...McDonalds. It actually turned out to be a great place to celebrate because they have a “play place” there. Hannah loved climbing on everything and sliding down the slides. We had a great time hanging out with our friends and having cupcakes. Hannah loved her chocolate cupcake too! She definitely takes after her Mom! Thank you all who sent us cards and gifts. Hannah really enjoyed opening her cards. She was so funny! She would open them and close them and open them and close them over and over again. They turned out to be some of her favorite toys. Sometimes she actually looked like she was reading them. It was so cute! She loved opening her presents too and playing with the wrapping paper of course. Hope you guys enjoy these pictures and the video!

Stateside

We had a great time in the states! Thank you all who gave us money to get there. We really appreciate it. We traveled back and forth from Texas to Oklahoma. We were able to hang out and connect with so many of our friends and family! We are so grateful for that. Hannah loved meeting everybody! She especially liked it when her grandparents would watch her and Mommy and Daddy got to go out! So many things happened while we were in the states. We had the privilege of going to a cabin for a weekend with a couple of our friends. We also got to get away for a weekend by ourselves!! Hannah learned to give a high five and wave bye bye! Her vocabulary also increased while we were there. She started saying uh oh, cat, and CoCo (Uncle Corey). Hannah also learned to imitate her Uncle Nano sneezing which was pretty funny to watch! It also snowed about 12 inches. Hannah loved the snow. One day she stared out the window and watched it all day long. Collin also had the honor of sharing at our home church in Dallas. He loved sharing about the Taiwanese and what God had put on his heart. We were so blessed by our time in states. Thank you all who took the time to come and see us and spend time with us. We enjoyed every moment. We are so blessed to have such amazing friends and family who encourage us and support us. We love you guys!

The month of December was a busy one for us. We recently have been preparing to visit the States, Collin turned 24, Collin shared his testimony and the gospel in Chinese at our church, and we also celebrated our first Christmas here. Christmas here was a new experience for our family. The Taiwanese don't really celebrate Christmas, unless they are Christians(which is actually a good thing, because only those who would truly celebrate the birth of our Savior would be Christians...). The percentage of Christianity in Taiwan is 2.5%. Most people relate Christmas to Santa Clause, presents, and a "fun" season, but they don't know the true meaning of Christmas. When Collin asked his English students what Christmas was about, they all unanimously said, "Santa....?" . Their next guesses were presents, family, etc... It's sad that this is the way that Christmas has been portrayed here in Taiwan and for that matter all throughout the world. December 25th is a normal working day here. People are working, shops are open, Post Offices are open, kids go to school, everything is operating as normal. Here in Taiwan YWAM has a local Coffee Shop called the Rock, which we have spoken about before. At the Rock we held many different Christmas activities to engage the students and hopefully spark their curiosity about why Christmas is celebrated. They had card making, cookie making, dramas, and a kid's program. Some people from our organization also went caroling in the neighborhood and passed out cards and cookies. As for our family Christmas Eve we spent the night at our friend's house. We ate dinner, played games, watched some movies, and went to bed too late:) Christmas morning we got up had a big breakfast exchanged some gifts and then we went back to our house and had our family time. Christmas night Collin and the language team went down to a hospital in Taipei, and did an outreach to Children Cancer Patients. It was an eye-opening time and also a time where these kids hopefully could take a break from their painful everyday routine and have some fun and really enjoy their childhood. Most of these kids were so young, so being cooped up in a hospital and stuck on an I.V. isn't much of a childhood. We were blessed to see them making balloon animals, playing with play-dough, and even enjoying a Christmas movie that we had brought. They heard the gospel, many of them even prayed, so we trust that God will complete His good purposes in their little hearts. At least they got to have some fun, and so did we! We feel honored to be able to spend Christmas here in Taiwan. Spending a major "holiday" like this here allows us to settle in a little more. Now we feel more as if Taiwan is our home. Continue to pray for us that we would understand how to engage this culture with the glory of God, and the gospel of His Son Jesus, in ways that will be relevant and understandable to their "Eastern Cultural Lenses". There is so much we need to learn about the culture, but we know that love is something that speaks across languages, so pray that we would love the Taiwanese even more.

Thanksgiving

We hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! The whole YWAM base here got together and celebrated. We had a blast! Our day started with pumpkin muffins and chai tea(thanks to Collin's Mom:) Around 9 a.m. we started to make our first turkey, which weighed 19 lbs! We had a lot of pressure on us because the turkey we were making wasn't just for us. It was 1 of the 9 turkeys that was going to be eaten by 160 people. So when I say pressure, I mean PRESSURE! By the way does anyone know what giblets are?? Anyone?....we had to figure that one out! So we researched and asked around how to make this wonderful turkey and everyone said something different so we decided to just try what we thought would work. We didn't have a pan large enough for the turkey so we had to squeeze the turkey it in. We learned that to keep the turkey moist you need to gather the juice that drips off the turkey and frequently glaze it over the turkey while it's cooking. Nothing we had was actually small enough to fit between the turkey and the pan, so we thought it would be brillant to use Hannah's medicine syringes (they were clean of course). 4 1/2 hours later our turkey was done and it looked and smelled delicious. Of course we needed to taste the turkey first, just to make sure that it was good enough to be eaten:) It was delicious.

We had a great time of fellowship at the get together. The food was marvelous and we had so much entertainment. It was so neat. We had a time of worship, talking about what we were thankful for, a talent show, and someone shared about the Thanksgiving story. The Thanksgiving story was very informative. There was so many things about the meaning of Thanksgiving that we had forgotten or didn't remember. Also our base is very diverse, with so many different cultures, most of whom didn't grow up celebrating Thanksgiving. We're sure they were excited to hear the story behind the "holiday with lots of good food".

The next day all the guys got together and had a "Turkey Bowl"; a flag football game. Collin's team lost, but he thinks it's because they ate too much the night before;)

We have many memories from this special day. We will never forget making our first turkey! It was defintiely an experience! We are so thankful for our family and freinds in the states! God has blessed us with such supportive and loving friends. We are so grateful! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Hannah's Eating Experience

Hey Everyone,
We wanted you to get an idea of what it's like feeding Hannah.....enjoy!

The past few weeks...

OUR FIRST VISITORS

Hey Everyone,
Sorry it's been such a long time since we last posted. So much has been going on and we've been pretty busy lately. Allison's grandparents came to see us for about two weeks. They arrived at the beginning of October and just left this past week. We had such a blast. A real encouraging and refreshing time. Here are a few funny quotes from our time with them:

-"Do they have Taiwanese dogs here?"
-"Is that the ice cream truck?" (ask us later)
-"I think Collin is half-Taiwanese."
-"Is Hannah speaking Chinese?"
-"Can we have slumber parties?"
-"How did we end up in the bus lane?"
-"Is this a one way street?" Grandad asked, Collin replied,"Yes both ways"

We were very grateful that they came all the way here to see us and to understand our new life and new home. WE hope to have many more visitors in the future:)

HANNAH GRACE
Hannah is growing up so fast, we can't believe it. She loves to laugh and smile....just like her mommy:) She especially loves to talk. Well not really talk, but to her it's talking. Right now she is super-active and her little personality is really coming out. She is so adventurous, diligent, determined, and curious. She is scooting all around the floor and doing more push-ups than daddy, because she wants to crawl so bad. She will lift her self up then "BOOOM!" fall flat on her face. Sometimes she looks like she's doing the "Worm". I'm sure all of you know what the "worm" is. We love her so much. Here's a video of Hannah's new language:





OUR NEW CHURCH
We found a new church. Or should we say, God has given us a church to go to. HE found it we didn't. Today was our 4th week to go and every time we are blown away by what God is doing in this church body. The pastor is a young 31 yr old man from Macau (near Hong Kong) who speaks Chinese, Cantonese, and English. Obviously the church is in Chinese but most of the people there can speak some English. The pastor's wife actually got saved through YWAM'S coffee bar ministry, THE ROCK 10 years ago! We have enjoyed worshiping and fellowshipping with this body of believers. They have asked us to start an English corner in the church. This will specifically target people who are not church members as a tool for evangelism. We started this yesterday. So every week on Saturday afternoons the whole family piles up and drives down to our church and gets to teach English and make friends with students of all different ages. The age range is this: 7 yrs old to 60 something. We have 17 students and we will cover a variety of topics including a week on religion. This will be a great opportunity for us to share the gospel with them and for them to see how it is radically different then all forms of religion. All the people but one student had never stepped foot into a church until yesterday and some of them stayed for the church's youth fellowship that immediately follows our class! We are really excited about this opportunity to share our lives with these students. Please pray that so much more than English lessons will take place!

We love you all and hope to hear from you soon!

The Seitz

"Celebrate, Jesus Celebrate!"

I am sure we have all heard the song, " Celebrate, Jesus Celebrate!". If you haven't, it tells me if you did or didn't grow up in church:) For all of us who grew up in church we have heard this song played a dozen times in a dozen ways with a dozen motions or actions. So when I heard that our Language team would be doing an English camp and that we would be teaching them this song, I thought to myself, "Wow, of course this would be the song we would teach them." Here we go teaching these kids a cheesy song with some cheesy actions...Man was I wrong. We had an opportunity to help out a church in Tianmu( a very foreigner(that's us) populated area near Taipei), do an English camp. We had a meeting and decided that we would teach them one drama and one song. In order to teach the kids these two things, we ourselves had to perform the drama and the song in front of the elders of the church:) Coming into this whole thing I was a little bit frustrated. I thought that this was just another thing to fill up my week. But God of course knew better. He knew what I needed, even if I needed a cheesy song, and drama. I am so thankful that our language team was able to create the drama and the motions to the song. We have a great group of guys who really did a wonderful job at making the drama and the song understandable and simple enough for these small children to enjoy and take part in. The camp lasted 3 days. Each day we had about and hour to an hour and a half with the kids, and during this time we would teach them the drama and song. The first 2 days were, teaching and practicing, and the last day was a performance in front of church members and parents. I wish I could put into words what my heart felt as I got to know these kids. I have never really seen "kid's ministry" as a priority. In my mind it went, adults-youth-kids, in that order. This was the first time that I realized that kids are just as much a priority as us adults are. In my mind my wife was always the one who had a heart for children, but I was called for a "higher" purpose: to preach and to pastor. This thinking is flawed in many ways that I don't need to go into right now. I am sure most of you can pick out many reasons why that thinking is wrong. The pictures above are just small windows into the lives of these kids. Granted, the area that the church is in is a very rich area, but when we had the performance, a small amount of parents were there. I could see how these kids wanted to hang all over you and have you hold their hand, play with them, teach them, laugh with them, and be their "big" friend.

A small boy in particular, the little boy in the picture above(yellow shirt, in the picture with just me and him) really touched my heart. In our drama, whatever character we played, we would need to teach the children who were going to play that part. My part in our drama happened to be the part of playing a little boy(go figure) who was a part of 3 children whom Jesus calls to be His disciples. I had the privilege of teaching 3 small children(the 3 photoed together above). These kids were awesome! The one in the yellow shirt, his name is 保羅 which is Paul in English. The other little boy's English name was 比得, which is Peter in English, and the other girls name in English was Tin-tin(?). They all have chinese names but Paul wanted me to call him bao-luo(how you would pronounce Paul in chinese). When the children came to me in order for me to teach them they were a bit shy. I think they were all 6 or 7 years old. In just a few minutes they began to feel my beard, touch my nose, wrinkle my ears, and pull my glasses off my face. It was great. After I got done teaching them the part, the two other kdis ran off to play while Paul stayed at my side. In his little 7 year old voice he came to me and said, "Hao, wo yao kao ni". Which means "I want to test you." I started laughing because this little boy was wanting to test me. So I said "Ok. Test me." He then began to tell me every joke he knew and wanted me to answer them. Most of the jokes I didn't understand completely so I just asked, "Why?" and he would tell me the answer. Then he asked one joke and I understood all of the chinese and answered right! He was surprised and loved it. It's amazing at how much even the littlest of chinese can create relationship. It was my turn next. I started asking him jokes and pulling tricks on him that I haven't used since grade school! We were laughing and talking and then he asked me,"Why is your nose so long?" "Why does you breath stink?" "Why didn't you shave your beard this morning?" "Guess how many brothers and sisters I have." I was laughing my head off at this moment. This little boy who, at first glance, would seem very shy and timid, was asking me all kinds of questions! He asked me my blood type, told me he could run very fast, and told me I needed to shave my beard. It's so hard to communicate through writing the expressions of his face and my face at this time. Those faces would share more than all of the words I could write.

The final day came and I was so happy that Hannah and Allison came with me! As soon as Allison and Hannah walked into the church it was as if they were superstars:) Every person was walking up to Allison and Hannah wanting to talk to them and of course hold Hannah. At one point we both looked around and noticed that neither one of us was holding Hannah and saw that one of the elders of the church was holding her. It was a great way to connect with the church. When one person would see Hannah, they would call all of their friends then all of them would come and want to hold Hannah and ask my wife a million questions. Being famous is a hard job;) God's gift to us through Hannah opens so many doors for us to have relationship with the Taiwanese. Over all we had a great time and I pray that the kids would come to know Jesus in a real,soul -saving way, if they haven't already.

Pray for us for the church has asked us to be a part of a project that they are doing to reach the kids of the neighborhood weekly. By doing this we would need to commit to this church and become members. This is a big decision, and requires us to make a "long-term" commitment. We need to pray and give an answer soon. Would you pray for us? We love you all! Enjoy this video below:)