Author: Neil Greb

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Dog Days of Summer

Hello to all of our family, friends, and followers!  Does anyone ever wonder where the phrase “Dog Days” comes from?  I actually had to look it up.  Apparently it originated with the Greeks and refers when the dog star Cirus was brightest in the night sky.  And what time of year was that?  During the punishingly hot summer.  And has this summer ever been punishing in Texas!  I believe East Texas has logged over 40 100-degree days this summer including a record breaking 107 degree day.  All of this with very little rain has resulted in drought-like conditions.  Absolutely brutal.  I don’t know how anyone survived here before air conditioning!  Anyways, let me recap the last couple of months and share the exciting news for our next adventure this fall.

Amy’s year-in-travel has looked a lot like mine last year.  She’s been in and out of town several times for both ministry and personal reasons.  She and Savana (more on her later) spent some time in the Dominican Republic in April helping to lead a DTS (Discipleship Training School) outreach.  In case you’re wondering how I survived her absence, we were all blessed to have aunt Lisa visit for a couple of weeks to help with the logistics of running the household.  So thank you…thank you…thank you to my sweet sister!

As Amy and Savana returned they hit the ground running, with Savana finishing the school year and Amy and I preparing for one of the biggest events our family had yet celebrated…Nolan’s graduation from Christian Heritage School!  What a special time it was to have Grammie and Amy’s sister’s family visit and celebrate with us.  We soon after travelled to Michigan to further celebrate Nolan with family and friends at his open house.  What fun it was to see the outpouring of love for him and our family!  If you’re reading this and you were there, we’re so glad you joined us!

Nolan, Landon and I quickly turned around back to Texas and back to work, while Amy stayed in Michigan with the rest of the kids so they could spend a few more days with Savana before she headed to college.  Wait a minute…COLLEGE?  I said I’d have more about Savana and her whirlwind year…and a dream come true!  Her next adventure was to join a group of high schoolers at Hillsdale College and set out for England and France to take a class about Winston Churchill and WWII.  And if y’all know anything about Savana, France is and has been her “thing” for quite awhile.  She had the time of her life experiencing Europe, and she may or may not already want to live there.  I don’t think any of us were surprised.

Shortly after Amy returned to Texas, she turned right around back to Michigan (I told you she travelled A LOT) for a dear friend’s wedding and to retrieve Savana from her globetrotting, before heading back to Texas.  So we all settled in together for our busiest season of the year, right?  Nope.  True to this year’s form, Amy (this time with Nolan) got to serve a group of teenagers for a week in July on outreach to New Orleans by cooking for them.

So now we find ourselves just a matter of weeks from the completion of staffing the DTS lecture phase, and it has been CRAZY busy!  Now that the kids have started school again, another layer of logistical maneuvering has been added to our plates.  But the Lord is faithful, and the answers and provision and energy are always there for us.  

Now for the BIG news for this fall…wait for it…wait for it…Amy and I (along with our kids, minus Nolan) will be leading a DTS outreach team to Lebanon for a month and then to Bemidji, Minnesota for two weeks!  We’re so excited to engage with people in the Sidon and Beirut region and to share the Gospel and love of Jesus through community outreach, education and skills development, food distribution, children’s ministry, and general relationship building with refugees!  Our time in Minnesota will primarily be devoted to facilitating a Vacation Bible School at a small church on the Leech Lake Reservation.  Please believe with us for safety, favor, open doors, and open hands as the Lord uses us for His purposes and His glory!

As usual, we appreciate all of the prayer we can get as we continue to disciple the DTS students through the remainder of the lecture phase and outreach.  If you have any questions at all or want to learn more about what the Lord has done, is doing, future plans (as far as we know) for our family, or how you can partner with us, we encourage you to reach out to us!  We love y’all…God Bless!

Neil

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21 Cities, 9 States and 2 Countries later…

Our family recently completed our move to Texas.  By “completed” I mean we’ve spent most of the last year in Texas attending two missionary training schools at YWAM-Tyler.  But following God’s call to join the staff at YWAM-Tyler, our official move to Texas just happened a couple of months ago.  Our lives as we knew them were packed up into a 8’ x 16’ storage container and at 5’ x 10’ cargo trailer, just waiting to be unpacked into our new reality.  As we arrived at our rental house we quickly got to work unloading boxes and bins, toys and tools, furniture and mattresses.

     Amy and I finally went to bed in what will be our house for the next year.  So I quickly drifted off to sleep, right?  Not so much.  As I laid there my mind began recollecting and calculating.  I was pretty sure it had been one year to the night we had last slept in our bed!  Pondering this revelation set me on a tangent where I recalled all of the different places I had slept in the previous year.  So I began counting.  Assuming I hadn’t forgotten any, I came up with 26.  On average, that’s a different bed approximately every two weeks for a year.  Here’s a summary that might help put it in perspective:

  • Most nights were spent in two different beds at Dorm #3 at YWAM-Tyler
  • 9 different hotel beds (Little Rock-twice, Tyler-TX, Dallas, Colorado Springs, North Platte-NE, Davenport-IA, Dearborn, Searcy-AR)
  • 9 different host homes (Thank you family and friends!)
  • 2 Bunk Beds (YWAM-Tyler cabin, YWAM-New Orleans)
  • Several nights on cots
  • 2 sofa beds
  • One night on a bus in Brazil
  • One night on an airplane back from Brazil
  • Beds in 21 different cities, 9 states, and 2 countries

     Of all of the beds in which we’ve slept during the last year, one probably stands out the most.  When our family arrived in Canapi, Brazil last September, we were shown to what would be our home for the next month.  Our family occupied roughly 600 square feet of upstairs space in a small house that included an open landing, two small bedrooms, and a bathroom.  

     So, what about the bed?  I’m sure our nearly 24 hours of travel and the exhaustion that ensued skewed my initial opinion about how comfortable the bed was.  Let me just say it was a bit firm.  Actually, really firm…like no mattress I had ever slept on before.  I like a firm mattress.  I hated this one.  It sat beneath a window (without screens) that, due to the mid 90 to low 100 degree temperatures most days, needed to be open at night (that’s right, no air conditioning).  It turns out that crickets in Brazil are of the flying variety.  It seems like they spend at least as much time in the air as on their legs.  So, open window + flying crickets = discovering crickets in bed occasionally.

     By the way, I didn’t mention that the bathroom could only be accessed through the bedroom shared by me, Amy, Titus (who had a pack ‘n play squeezed into the corner), and our board…I mean mattress.  And if you haven’t traveled to many places outside the United States, let me explain a couple of things about bathrooms.  Toilets are only supposed to get flushed when they receive solid waste (to conserve water), and toilet paper doesn’t get flushed, it gets thrown in the trash (don’t get me started on foreign plumbing).   The result is the occasional wafts that result emanating from the bathroom while we lie on our bamboo mattress and try to sleep.

     You might be wondering why I’d be (seemingly) wasting your time to tell you about beds.  Why do I feel like it’s important for me to share about sleeping on an uncomfortable mattress in a sometimes smelly room that may or may not have crickets?  Let me share something I’ve learned in the last year or so:  Living smack dab in the middle of God’s will for our lives and for His purposes has a way of transforming even the most unfortunate circumstances and uncomfortable surroundings into something so beautiful and so fulfilling.  While the sleeping accommodations were less than ideal in many of the places we’ve stayed in the last year, they in no way influence the fondness of our memories from those places.  In fact, our experiences in these places make our memories or our sleeping arrangements seem more fond. 

     Smelly cricket-room: so what…ministry in Brazil was life-changing.  Squeezing our family of nine into a small hotel room: no problem…our life on the road is full of opportunity to share the love of Jesus.  Sleeping on cots in a basement: whatever…we’ve had such sweet, sweet times of fellowship with family and friends.  Bunk beds in a cabin: bring it on…so many amazing relationships were built living in community with others.  Our lives are so full and we feel so blessed to be living our lives of ministry, it has a way of making every circumstance and memory a precious one.  Even sleeping on bamboo, or a couch, or a plane, or a bus…

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Canapi, Brazil Outreach: Travels and Week 1

After almost three months of DTS school and many weeks of prayer for our outreach in Brazil, we finally made it! The Grebs are on the ground in Canapi!


For those of you who may be a bit geographically challenged, it turns out Brazil is pretty far away, even from the southern United States. It’s not exactly a close neighbor to the south (and actually quite a bit east). Our adventure began on the afternoon of September 19th as we left YWAM-Tyler on a bus destined for Dallas. We stayed the night in a hotel near the airport so we could more easily make our 6 a.m. flight on the 20th! Imagine the helter-skelter atmosphere of waking up at 2:45 a.m. and trying to get 12 adults and 24 kids to the airport, their boarding passes, bags checked, through security, to the gate, and on the plane before 6 a.m.! All things considered, everyone did an amazing job and believe it or not, with little drama. We had just enough time to land in Miami, deplane, and catch our connecting flight to Recife, Brazil. This was approximately a 9 hour flight which landed in Brazil at 10 p.m. local time. Everyone boarded a tour bus for the six hour ride to Canapi, where we arrived just about 5 in the morning. I mentioned the thing about 24 kids, right? God gave us much grace, and a little more, and then some more. He is SO GOOD!


So…Canapi. Nestled in what is considered the Brazilian desert in northeast part of the country, they’re just entering spring and I hear there are two seasons: rainy season (winter), and hot and dry season (which includes now). Mid 90s and dry almost every day. It’s a town of about 7,000-8,000 people. Mostly poor people. Beautifully kind and welcoming people. This is an area of Brazil that is largely overlooked, the after-thoughts, which largely explains a conversation I had with a local boy the other day. EVERYONE in town is noticing and talking about the visitors from the United States. “Why is that?”, I asked. Because no one comes and visits Canapi. No tourists here…ever. It’s not the kind of place tourists would visit.


It’s a place where religion is deeply rooted (almost everyone talks openly about things like God, Jesus, and prayer), yet very few seem to know or even understand relationship with God. Our hosts and leaders of YWAM-Canapi, Elianderson and Kate Nacacio, are AMAZING people. They actually gave their emphatic “yes” to the offer for us to come knowing they were likely to deliver a baby while we were here. They had a baby boy…Joshua. Elianderson (a native Brazilian) and Kate (a native New Zealander) actually sought out the most needy places in Brazil to determine where they would plant their ministry. By almost every measure, Canapi was the neediest, so here is where they came.


Ministry here has varied. As a team we have done services in a variety of settings including a children’s street church, the local baptist church, the YWAM base in Canapi, local homes, and in local villages. A typical service usually consists of praise and worship, a skit, games (when it’s children), personal testimonies and a message. Truthfully these are not settings that have opened up due to our presence here, but have arisen from several years of groundwork laid by our hosts.


Along with these services our ministry has focused on sharing the love of Jesus with the people of Canapi. They love story-telling here. It’s amazing how just a conversation on someone’s porch, in the market, in a bakery, anywhere to be honest, can open up opportunities for ministry and prayer. And practically everyone here is open to it. We are learning so much about the value of slowing down, and taking time to just BE with people. It really seems so counter-productive. But opportunities come. Doors open. Aren’t we usually too quick to move on to the next porch, the next market, the next bakery, the next anywhere? Or not looking closely enough (or at all) for an open door?


All along the way we remember, each and every one of them is made in the image of God and is therefore lovable, so we love them. We share with them as much as we can, sometimes with no interpreter or no Google Translate (thank goodness for it), that they are special. They are worthwhile. They can live in relationship with their Creator and their Savior.
They are not after-thoughts.
They are not forgotten.

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Week 7: Sufficiency of Scripture

The kids with the infamous Buc-ee!

Greetings again from YWAM Tyler! 

In case you didn’t know, the Bible is an amazing book.  For real.  You may come across some who try to deny its historical accuracy and reliability in an effort to discredit it, so do the research.  I’m not going to go into lots of detail here, but no ancient texts that we generally consider accurate even come close to the Bible in terms of number of early manuscripts that not only exist but also corroborate each other.  Not to mention the Old Testament’s remarkably precise prophetic/predictive nature (i.e. Isaiah 7, Isaiah 53, Zachariah 9, Daniel 7).

All issues of historical significance aside, let’s face it, we’ve all at one time or another thought of the Bible in one of two ways:

-A devotional book by which we study a particular scripture, section of scripture, or book of the Bible to learn more about God through principles we find there.

– A book of rules that instructs us in the way we should live our lives.

I’m not saying the Bible isn’t useful for either of these purposes, because it is.  But if these are the only ways we view the Bible we’re missing a larger point:

-The WHOLE Bible is a cohesive, longitudinal story that tells the story of a personal God and his never-stopping, never-giving up, unbreaking, always-and-forever love (thank you Jesus Storybook Bible). 

Think about it, the entire Old Testament illustrates this and the New Testament is the ultimate fulfillment of it.  God makes a covenant with His people.  His people keep covenant for a while (usually a short while).  His people mess things up (break His laws).  After suffering consequences of their decisions, they come back to Him.  In His ultimate grace, love, and mercy He takes His people back and relationship is restored. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat again.  Look for it, over and over again.  Exodus.  II Samuel. Jonah. On and on it goes.

By the way, His people doesn’t just mean Israel…it’s you and me.  We are little Israels.  Disobey…return…accepted back.  But there’s great news.  The Gospel.  Jesus followed the rules the way Israel (or all of us little Israels) never could.  Then he died a rule-breaker’s death so we could be forever pardoned and forever clean.  Not only His people, but His forever children.  And Him our forever Father.

So that is a (brief) summary of some of what we learned in week 7.  The week ended with what we thought was going to be fun family outing to a peach orchard.  We had heard about Ham’s Orchard (about an hour away, toward Dallas) from someone on our DTS staff shortly after arriving.  Peach pulled pork.  Award winning barbeque. Peach soft serve ice cream.  All eagerly anticipated.  Well, it turns out they don’t know in Texas that orchard season is just getting started in August.  Well, at least in Michigan it is.  We were greeted by an almost empty parking lot because Ham’s had essentially shut down the previous weekend and was only selling peaches from this year’s bumper crop.  So we were presented with a great opportunity to prepare for outreach and be FLEXIBLE!  Everyone handled the unexpected turn of events and we made an on-the-fly plan to have lunch and a pop (or “a Coke” as they would say in Texas) at the legendary and unparalleled Buc-ee’s.  It’s definitely a phenomenon down here.  Check it out online, but you can’t even imagine it until you’ve been there.

The same evening we got the opportunity to experience our first YWAM Tyler Love Feast…essentially a banquet to honor the previous school session graduates and hear amazing stories about their outreaches to places like France, Greece, Romania, and domestic outreach in Atlanta.  As we watched the graduates on stage at Love Feast, it was hard not to imagine ourselves on stage, graduating after outreach in just three months!  We’re so excited for what God will do in our last few weeks of class and how He will work through us in Brazil and Houston.  God is moving in the Greb family, y’all (did I just say “y’all?)  So please pray.  Then pray some more!  We love you all…

Oh, and by the way…the peaches were delicious!