Finally!

Well after some travel delays, cancellations and lost baggage (which was retrieved finally!), we are here in our home city! God has been good to us through all of it, and now it is time to go to work!

We are staying at another GCC’s house temporarily while they are stateside, though they are with a different company. It is fully furnished, but we are still living out of suitcases for now. However, we have located and seen some apartments here with the help of our team members, who have been an incredible blessing to us regarding us getting set up to survive life here early. I knew that God had a place to stay for us long before we even chose to follow His plan to come here, and in a matter of days we have signed a contract on a brand new apartment. It will be ready in 2-4 weeks for us to move in because the electricity, cabinets and cleaning needs to be finished. God is showing us His provision right at the start.

The kids have been doing fine, no bad signs of culture shock, other than jet-lag waking them up at 3AM for about a week, but we are pretty much over that now. The other part of culture shock is the fact that they cannot just go outside to play, or play with the national kids. These kids are not around much because they are in school 6 days a week and when they get home from school they are doing homework for the afternoon. Our team members have 2 kids, and my daughter and their daughter, only 2 years apart, have become very quick friends. My 4 year old son just likes to play video games or eat, which is a close match to their 15 year old son, the only difference is age!

We will be traveling as a family for some intensive language training in another city next week. It ought to be fun, because we’ll be traveling by train. We then come back and find someone for our one on one language teaching, which is called “barefoot learning”. That means that there is no formal classroom, but we are to use our language teacher for a couple hours per day and then we are on our own to practice what we learn. That is our primary task now for the next 4 months, as the company will pay for our teacher for that long. We are on our own to learn what we can from there. I realize that it is very important to know the language to be affective, because we have been very dependent on our team members to help us get things done. Hopefully we will be able to learn enough to survive on our own soon enough.

I hope that I have not bored anyone, but this is definitely a process more than we had ever expected, and sometimes seems very overwhelming. However, we know that God is with us, and He has been working here long before we arrived, and just as Joseph told Pharoah that he could not do it himself, but God could. We know that we must rely on God for all of our needs. Pray that we can incorporate ourselves into the culture and the community to show Christ to those who have never heard of Him.

Arrival!!

And we have arrived!! Through many cancellations, delays and 3 different airlines (our arrival came from a different airline and a different location than first booked) we are in the country that God has planned for us to be in, to begin the work that He has chosen for us to do, even before we were born. We are happy to be here, and are waiting on 8 of our 12 bags that did not arrive with us! Big surprise, as many others here are waiting on their luggage also. Through this, we have learned not to take for granted even the simplest of things. Air travel was rough, and now we have little clothes, but I know that we are to trust and rely on God and not the things of this world. So we are praying that our bags will come to us before heading to our final destination city on Tuesday. Our team members are waiting for us there with temporary housing while we will look for a place to stay. Thank you for all your prayers during travel. God must be planning to use us for some great things, or our enemy would not have been trying to hinder us at the last minute from coming, and discouraging us by our bags not being here. Pray that we stay focused now more than ever on His word and rely on Him alone.

Final Goodbyes

The countdown has begun. The excitement is building. After two years of God leading me and my family to serve Him internationally, selling a house, several volunteer trips to South Asia, 8 weeks of orientation, it has come down to just days away from leaving the U.S.

And the excitement is filled with mixed emotions. I knew that saying goodbye to family would be tough, and it has been. This last week my dad, the one who my son is named after, came to visit me and the kids. It was good to see him and talk with him in person. Also, my uncle came up to visit us this past weekend from Alabama and attend church with me Sunday. It was a great time and so good to see and be with familiar faces. Likewise, my wife has been visiting her family in Montana this past week. She will be saying her final goodbyes today as she comes back to do final packing. It has been harder the closer we get to leaving to say goodbye.

Yesterday at our church, I was worshipping during service, and it started to hit me that this is the last corporate worship I will be in with my church family for years. I found it hard to keep my emotions in while singing in worship. What a great church family and staff God has blessed us to be among. They are so loving and so supportive. Our close friends that we have been around this last 2 weeks are the ones we have been doing life with for the past several years, and it will be hard to say goodbye to them. We have been so blessed to have such great friends who would drop anything at anytime for us, and sometimes they have. They live out their faith by being obedient to laying down their lives for their friends. Greater love is not found anywhere, and we love you all for the sacrifices you have made for us all over the years!!

We then ready ourselves for a long journey, about 24 hours of travel, and obvious culture shock upon arrival for the kids. Our team members, who are the only IMB personnel in the city we are going, and quite possibly the only non-south asians, are quite alone. It will be good to see them and minister and fellowship with them when we get there. They are going to be a huge help to us as we move in. Then we begin to put all the learning we've had into practice. I know that we have a specific job with the IMB for a specific people group in South Asia, but our main job is to be Jesus to the people we come in contact with, to share God's word with those who have never heard of Him. To spread the fame of His name in a place where the enemy has had reign for thousands of years. We will be attacked spiritually more than we have ever been attacked, in ways that we haven't even thought of, but we know that just as God was with Joseph and Job, He is always with us. We can trust in this promise: "The Lord Himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged." Deuteronomy 31:8

We're Home!!!

Wow, did 8 weeks go by fast or what? We are back home after finishing strong at FPO. What a rich time it was, and what a great time we had at the very end.

To sum up our 8 weeks, we were filled with all kinds of teaching, our time was filled almost every minute, our worship time each Sunday morning was a small group worship, and we also had cultural worship every Sunday night with the entire community. Our cultural worship was very good, and showed us how different countries worship God. There was Korean, Chinese, African, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American. All great moving times of corporate worship. Our last Sunday together was a time of our own worship, one we are so blessed to be able to celebrate. I thought I was the only one who was weeping by worshipping for the first time in familiarity, but as I looked around most everyone was emotionally moved by this worship of Jesus that we all had missed so much.

We finished on Tuesday morning with the commissioning of the entire group who are being sent out to our regions in the next two weeks. Jerry Rankin spoke and Clyde Meador prayed over us, as the rest of the 400 visitors to see their family members commissioned held their hands over us and prayed for us. My wife and I were priviledged to have 3 pastors from our church attend the service, and what a blessing that was to us! Not just familiar faces after 8 weeks, but special ones in our lives. Our Associate Pastor, who is the one who encouraged me to walk in obedience to God calling me to go on my first mission trip to South Asia and has continued to pour into our lives the encouragement we have needed during this time. To our marriage and family pastor who believed in us and encouraged us not to give up on ourselves when we were almost down and out years ago, and helped us to let God do a healing in us. To the missions pastor who was with the IMB for 15 years before taking his current position, who has helped to guide us and encourage us throught this whole process. It meant so much for you to be there and I can't describe how we felt with you present at that moment.

We flew home Wednesday, and since have been going through all of our stuff and trying not to be overwhelmed with the decision about what to pack for the next 3 years! We'll make it through. We are so excited to be home, but also very excited to be close to flying to where God is going to use us.