We’ve made it to 90% of our goal for pledges for our monthly financial need! Thank you for your prayers, and thank you to all of you who have joined our ministry team! We’re excited about our progress and thank God for all He has done.
We thought we’d give you an update on our plans. So far, each time we’ve set a goal for departure, in addition to not reaching our full financial goals something big has happened to keep us from going. We started raising support full-time in mid-September last year and at that time we set a goal for departure for January 2008. Well, when January came around, violence and upraising Kenya made it impossible for us to go there, so even if we had met our financial goals, we wouldn’t have been able to leave. When January didn’t work out, we set a new goal of June, 2008. But, when June came around, we hadn’t quite reached our financial goal in June, so we starting thinking about a late fall departure. Then in mid-June my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor, had brain surgery, and we found out his tumor was cancerous. Since then, we’ve talked with my parents and with Wycliffe, and we decided to stay in the US through the holidays and leave in January 2009.
We’ve reached about 80% of our monthly support goal. We’re continuing to speak at churches, with pastors, missions committees and other interested individuals. In the fall, we’re hoping to spend more time in Southern California for another round of Wycliffe Associates banquets.
We’ve had some unexpected detours in our journey, but we know that God is in control.
We’re both back in New England…at the same time…at our temporary home in Massachusetts. After a couple of intense months, we’re trying to recover. Last night we put away clothes. We’re both normally very light travelers, but our travels in March, April and May required us to pack for winter, spring, and summer, casual and dressy. So, there were sweaters and wool socks in the same suitcases as shorts and bathing suits.
Today is laundry and bathroom cleaning day for me and a lawn mowing day for Jeff. Tuesday we’ll probably go through all of our papers. We have a mail forwarding service, so we’ve been collecting mail all over the place. Some of it came to us while we were traveling and then was put into our suitcases. Some came to us here. Everything now has to be sorted, filed, shredded or trashed.
What makes me the most happy about being back in the northeast right now is–the winter is over!
One more bit of news, we’re now at 75% of our support quota. We’re so thankful that God has brought us this far. Only 25% left!
While we were away, Jeff had our mail held, and it wasn’t until today that we received a large delivery including all of last week’s mail. In it were a few response cards with some new pledges for support! We opened them wondering if these new commitments might bring us to the goal we had been praying about. It did!! God has now taken us to 65% of our support!!
If you have no idea what we are talking about, as missionaries of our organization we do not receive a guaranteed salary. Our salary (and funds needed for our benefits and our ministry expenses) come from the generous gifts of individuals and churches. Our organization has set an amount that we need to have each month, and then individuals and churches pledge to provide us a certain amount regularly.
Thanks for praying with us! How awesome to see God answer our prayers!
