What's Next For The Stepps?! Hey friends and family!! Hope you are doing splendid!! The question that humanity as a whole is always asking is, "What's Next?" This letter is a tribute to that question! We are well into our last quarter of our School of Biblical Studies with University of the Nations! We are currently studying my favorite books, the Prophets! It has been such a great experience being able to study the bible together! We see the value of studying the bible, because this will be the foundation for our lives from here on out! Be it in our family, workplace, or community, what we are learning is able to apply to all those avenues! Now for the meat on the sandwich! (Sorry, vegetarians!) “What's next!?” When we arrive back in the U-S of A we will be watching all your beautiful fireworks from above! We arrive back in Kansas on the 4th of July!!! Why Kansas you might ask?  Kaycee's Uncle Steve has his master's licenses in electrical, plumbing, and heat and air. He has started a business and I am going to work alongside him and learn a trade!  (Been a dream of mine for awhile!) But that's not even the best part! The main reason he is starting this business is to use it as a tool for discipleship! My heart has always been for people and transformation! I love watching people come in to their real identity in Christ so this totally lines up with my heart! Kaycee will be helping her parents part-time, and work on some other projects on the side. Another surprise, our first house we lived in right after we got married has come available again! Looking forward to calling that lovely nook Home again! Before we leave there is something we must do... During our breaks we haven't had much cash to go out and see this beautiful country. So before we leave we have a week to really get out and go explore God's beautiful creation here in South Africa! We are planning to go on safari in Kruger National Park! Our housing has already been booked, we just need our flights and car rental now! We see this as one of those once and in a lifetime opportunities! Will you help us go out with a BOOMSHAKALAKA!? We appreciate all your interest in our journey! It will be awesome to return home and reconnect with you. Thank you also for your financial and prayer support. Every time we have come up short God has supplied through your gifts, or some other way we never would have been able to conjure up!  Uriah & Kaycee Stepp 319 E. 8th, Edmond, OK 73034 • kingdomcouple.blogspot.com • uriah.stepp@gmail.com All rights reserved.Copyright © 2016 KingdomCouple, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

Steady As We Go!

Hello Everyone!!

Hope that you all are doing amazing!! Kaycee and I just finished our second of three terms of SBS and we're now enjoying a one-week break!! I think one of my favorite projects was being able to make a timeline of Kings and Chronicles.

   I know most people think.. "Oh those boring books that just talk about a bunch of random people doing a bunch of random things"... But this really brought these books alive to me! One of the greatest lessons learned so far is that the Israelites had to go through the wilderness for training purposes.  That is where God revealed so much of his character and his deep commitment to his people. As normal human beings we want to skip the struggle, but God wants to take us to a new level of dependence on him, so we must go through it.

    Another very fruitful things we have been able to partake in is our local outreach ministries! I can speak for both of us when I say, these ministries have both really stretched us, and formed us to be more like Christ! I have been so blessed to watch the Holy Spirit work through me as we minister to the people on the streets. It is so amazing to walk up to someone and pray for them and God reveal just how much purpose these people have in their lives! The majority of the people we minister to are homeless and have not had the easiest life. The relationships that have been made here will never be forgotten! Kaycee helps with an after-school program in a place called Grassy Hill. There are about fifteen kids between ages 7-11 who come. She and the team have felt led to help the kids along in the area of prayer through short teachings and exercises.  Although she is uncomfortable with teaching, she loves spending time with them and helping disciple them!
 
   God has been so faithful to us! Remembering back last September when we were gearing up to come out here, my mind is blown by just how detailed God has been in orchestrating all of this! He has brought us so far physically speaking and spiritually speaking. We were just talking with some friends the other day about marriage, and Kaycee and I both agree that this has been the best year of marriage for us no doubt! We have grown so much in our marriage as well as individual people. Marriage and missions is not always the easiest thing, especially when you are immersed in community and you put in any where from 40-60 hours a week into studies. God has had so much grace on us in this area! We really believe God has stretched us in our marriage for the best!

Please continue to pray with us!! 

It is so important to us to finish, and finish strong!

• Pray that we continue to enter in to this final term with the same hunger as when we started. It is super easy to fall into a place where we just do what we need to do to get by seeing as we are on the final stretch!

• Pray we receive the reaming funds we need for rent and health insurance and our plane tickets home!

• Pray we continue to grow in our marriage!

• Pray we remain intentional, and focus on the rest of our time here!

Thank you so much for taking time to see where we are! We are so grateful for your support! 

Sharing The Love!!

Happy Valentine's Day! It's been a while since we updated.  We hope that your 2016 has gotten off to an awesome start! We celebrated by getting dressed up and enjoying some food, live music, and fireworks with thousands off beautiful people downtown Cape Town! Then we got back into the study grind.. We do enjoy weekends, though. Uriah went to the Mumford & Sons concert a few weeks ago and got a deal that couldn't be passed up!! Last night we got the chance to go and worship with 30,000 other Jesus lovers at the stadium in Cape Town! We've also been swimming in the ocean and really been blessed by our friends to partake in life outside of the crazy world of Biblical studies. Also, I was able to get an amazing new haircut (Uriah added in the amazing part)!!

The New Testament studies are finished for now, and we have moved on into studying the Old Testament. Studying the Pentateuch has been really different from our New Testament studies, but it's so awesome to get to see God in action. Before we started studying, I thought that God changed his mind about people in the New Testament: Old Testament God was angry and just killed everybody, New Testament God is nice. But for the first time I am really seeing the same God throughout scripture. That’s really cool.

So our studies are still taking up most of our time. We study and are in class 40+ hours/week. Aside from that we participate in weekly intercession (prayer for others), weekly worship, and participate in weekly local outreach. Uriah is totally in his element talking and praying with people he meets on the streets! This last week my new local outreach started and I LOVED it! Five of us are going each week to a Christian after-school program for 8-11 year olds in a place where a majority of the students are Muslim. We are excited to teach the students more about the Bible and we really felt in our preparation time that God wanted us to teach them about prayer and life in the Spirit! It's so awesome to see what God has been doing in Cape Town and to be a part of it.

We are doing great with housing and all this work and everything.  At this point our biggest need is financial. We have about $4600 that we still need to finish out the school. We are praying that God will provide the remaining balance, and that we can purchase our tickets this month!! Thank you for your continued prayer and financial support. We wouldn’t want to do it without you!

Merry Christmas from the Stepps!

Merry Christmas all of you wonderful people! We hope and expect that this holiday season you got to enjoy time with family and friends, and that it has brought you back to the sweet place of remembering how God sent Jesus as a baby to change everything! We want to first say thank you for being with us on this journey through relationship with us, and through your financial gifts and prayer. We will never be able to say it enough..THANK YOU!! It has been an incredible year for us, and we are thankful to God and humbled by the support of our loved ones!  It's hard to believe this time last year, we had just finished our lecture phase of the Discipleship Training School (DTS) through Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in South Africa, and we were in Nepal on our outreach phase. Being away during the holidays was hard for us, but God gave us friendships with our teammates and the Nepali people that brought us such comfort. We got to stay in Nepal for 3 months and build relationships with a church called Fresh Fire, work in an orphanage, a feeding center, and a leprosy colony, go on a trek, and pray for many people at the temples. It was an amazing time! In March we finished up our outreach and went back to South Africa and graduated from our DTS.  This 6 months was such a growing experience for each of us personally, but also for our marriage! We really got to know each other, through the tough and amazing times! We then traveled back to the States to spend time with family and figure out what God had next for our journey! Whilst spending time with family and friends catching up, we saw on the news that two large earthquakes had pelted Nepal. Side note: While we were on outreach during DTS many of us felt led to pray that God would shake the foundations and that all the temples and false idols would fall to the ground. WHOA!! Who would have known that shortly after those prayers a 7.8 earthquake would come shake Nepal and many of the temples and idols would be destroyed! Now on the other side of that we felt the weight of what our new friends were going through. Our hearts were broken for the people we had grown to love, but we also felt the excitement of God shaking not only the physical but the spiritual atmosphere in Nepal. We were able to go back to Nepal in May to help take down unstable structures and love on the people! After one month, we felt that we should go back home and help our Great Grandmother,  Pauline Clark, recover after taking a very hard fall and having a brain bleed. So we lived with Pauline for a couple months whilst she recovered! Praise Jesus for healing her! She is one of the strongest people I know, and she is now almost 100%, going here and there and truly taking care of herself! God is Good!  While we were there we took some time and prayed a lot into what God would have next for us. There were many opportunities, but we truly felt that we should deepen our understanding of God's Word! Which leads us to where we are now! We are now attending a school through University of the Nations (YWAM's university) called School of Biblical Studies (SBS). Through our first 3 months, we studied 20 books of the New Testament using the inductive method. We attend lectures, then we begin to dig in for ourselves. First we observe the text from the original reader's point of view with the historical background in mind, then we start to interpret the text and discover timeless truths and apply them to our lives. The process is long, we easily spend 50 hours per week studying and in class. It is exhausting at times, but there is a deep sense of God expanding our knowledge and understanding of who he is.                                             Currently we are on a 3 week Christmas break. It has been very restful! We had the opportunity to house sit for a couple here who went on a road trip! They have a very nice apartment and it was so healthy for Kaycee and I to have some space to ourselves and really focus on our marriage! We have 2 more weeks left of our break, and we have created a bucket list for our time here in Cape Town, so we hope that with some of our Christmas money to take part in some of that fun stuff!   Please be Praying for us! That Uriah's grant money for school will come. It has been sent, but we haven't received it due to the mail system in South Africa. That our financial needs would be met: $2400 for rent and health insurance for the remaining six months of SBS. Our return flight back home after SBS-roughly $2000. Spending money for cell phone, toiletries, misc., date nights-about $600. That we would continue to grow deep into God and trust him! That our marriage would continue to grow and thrive. We would like to build up our monthly support, which would make budgeting a lot easier, as well as further prepare us for whatever might be next! Would God have you partner with us on a monthly basis? It would be awesome if you would think and pray about it. May God bless you and you family as you wrap up 2015 and begin your 2016! We pray that it is full of all things good and lovely, and that God will take you to a deeper place of knowing who he is and trusting him! We would love to hear what God is doing in your lives, too! It helps us feel connected and we want to pray for you! Please email us. Much love, The Stepps PS-We didn't know how to write a letter without subscribing you, so if you don't want to receive further emails from us, just hit the unsubscribe button! But our intentions are not to spam you. :) Copyright © 2015 Kingdom Couple, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 319 E. 8th Edmond,  OK 73034 OR VIA PAYPAL HERE!! :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Merry Christmas Everyone!!

God has been so faithful these past couple months!!

So most of you know we came to South Africa to take part in a program called SBS (School of biblical studies) with Youth With A Mission! We have just completed our 1st term (3-months), we have covered 20 books of the bible using the inductive study method, taught 1 book, and have taken 3 tests! These books have really come alive! We read all of Paul's Epistles and found loads of historical background info on all these different letters!

We also have been doing local outreach here in Muizenberg. Uriah has been loving this! (IN HIS ELEMENT!!) He has been doing street ministry and really connecting with people on the streets!

"God has been teaching me so much about equality, God loves the people on the streets just as much as he loves you and me! They are just as much sons and daughters of God as you and I."

A couple cool testimonies:

• So we have a place to stay for the remainder of this school!  
• We had our debit card info stolen... about $700! Thank Jesus for banks with insurance. After the process of filing a fraud claim, and after 8 days we received all of our money back!!
• The other night after our last day of class, a bunch of us were sitting and discussing what we walked away with from our first three months. We all did the same book assignments and sat through the same classes, but we all walked away from the first term with something different. God met each of us here in such different ways! 

So now we are on our 3-week break. We don't have any plans, really, except that Uriah and I are going to stay in our friends' apartment while they're away..all by ourselves!! On our list of things to do are sleep (a lot), drink coffee (also a lot), eat, watch movies, go to the beach, repeat.. The best word to describe it? Glorious.

Thinking about Christmas without family again is a little bit sad. This year we will be spending it with our couple-friends from Switzerland and a few people that are sticking around for break!

Please let us know how we can pray for you! Email us at uriah.stepp@gmail.com !!

You can get updates from us via email right here!

Thanks so much for your prayers and support!

God is Faithful!!

Hi friends and family! We hope you all are doing well and enjoying wearing your sweaters and sipping on pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks while watching a good game of football or carving pumpkins or jumping in leaf piles.. I seriously miss fall, for the second year in a row I miss fall! But I do have the beach and mountains. I guess it's a good trade. 

Muizenberg Beach!!

           Anyways, we are doing GREAT!  You haven't heard from us much because our time is quickly eaten up by studies.  It is hard to believe we are already starting our 7th book using the inductive study method!  In the inductive method we read and observe entire books from the view of the original audience with historical background and context in mind, and then we eventually  find the "timeless truths" that we can then apply to our lives.

 In a typical week we will study 25+ hours, attend 12 hours of class, participate in 2+ hours of "work duties" (chores) and 2+ hours of local outreach, and base worship and base intercession.  It is basically a full-time job, but it's the most rewarding full-time job ever. Our minds are being renewed and our hearts are exploding for Jesus! :)

                                   

 Since we last updated you we found permanent housing (till the school is over in June). I think I mentioned last time that we are living off base because there are so many students on base they didn't have room for us. It has been kind of nice, though, having a quiet place to land at night. It's good for us. We stay with a little lady from Zimbabwe and she is really great. 

 

To get around quickly we invested in two long boards! I really enjoy riding with Uriah. I think I'm catching on, but I'm still not very fast and hills scare me!                              This is our lovely Church called Connect!! It is literally right across the street from where we are living! It is so amazing to come together in midst of a hectic week and be with Family!!

Now for our favorite part: Finances!  We are thankful to have all of our food and most of our school fees paid. Uriah's Indian Tribe grant paid all of his fees!!! We still need about $5550!God is faithful!

We are really working on a group of monthly supporters!! Please consider and pray about supporting us monthly!! 

If you feel this is something that 

God is leading you to do, please email us at: uriah.stepp@gmail.com

Thank you guys for your continued support through prayer and giving. We pray that God will bless you and your families.

"What you feed will grow, what you starve will die." -Craig Groschel

Lots of travel and new stuff has happened since our last post. We had a 12 hour layover in London, where we took the underground railroad (lol, jk) and saw several interesting things, including Big Ben, the London Eye, and Westminster Abbey! Kaycee's first time in Europe was pretty awesome!

Now we are in Muizenberg, Cape Town! A family is letting us stay in their sweet little granny flat for cheap until we find something more permanent. So we got all moved in there, we saw some old friends, we met scores of new ones, and started class today! It is going to be an awesome, crazy, busy time!

Thank you for your prayers and financial support so far! We feel incredibly blessed to be where we are and to get to study the Bible for 9 months. Right now, please pray with us that we will find more permanent housing that is closer to the base.

We trust you are doing well, too. Email us or send us a message any time to chat or if you want us to pray with you. We love and miss you!