On my way to the USA
It’s Friday morning May 24th. This afternoon I will be on a plane headed for Fiji where I will overnight. On Saturday evening I head out of Fiji for LAX, arriving Saturday afternoon – before I left Fiji.
I will be in the USA for about a month. The purpose of the trip is for me to represent our group at the Wycliffe conference in Orlando. As a side benefit, I will be seeing family and friends in Michigan as well as friends in California and Florida. At the end of June, I will attend the wedding of one of our Solomon Islands colleagues before coming back home home. While I am in the USA, I will have a cell phone and can be contacted at: (248) 730-5869.
We would appreciate your prayers for our family as we are separated. Tim will be busy with continuing to work on many important projects while single parenting.
Good-bye…for now
One thing that missionary kids get a lot of practice in doing is saying good-bye. It is not fun and happens far too often. We’ve said many a tearful good-bye at this very spot in the International terminal.
A couple of weeks ago we took the girls out of school in the middle of the day for a trip to the airport to say good-bye to one of our colleagues, Julie. We first met Julie a few years ago when she came to the Solomons on a summer missions trip. Now she’s helping the Kwaio people translate the New Testament in their own language. She’s been faithfully doing it out on her own, but last year God blessed her with a wonderful Christian man and they are getting married in June in Illinois. They will be back here to serve together about a year from now.
Emily and Sarah wanted very much to see Julie off at the airport. Julie is a part of the extra family Jesus promised to those who leave their land and family to follow him.
Footwear Optional
A couple of weeks ago, one of our translation families was getting ready to go out to their village for a 3-4 month stay. We hosted them for Sunday dinner the day they left. Later we discovered that one of the kids had left his ONLY pair flip-flops at our house.
After the family got to the village we got a radio message asking us to please send the flip-flops out to the village sometime. “No big hurry,” we were told. He only needs them in time for the trip back to town on the ship in August!
For missionary kids in the tropics, shoes are very often optional!
My Mother’s Day
My last blog was written about my neighbor getting a pig for Mother’s Day. It turned out that I got part of one, too! The ladies group at our church had a Mother’s Day retreat on Saturday and we all went to church together Sunday morning. The women planned the entire church service and I’ll have to say it was one of the more lively services we have had in a long time.
After the morning service the men served a beautiful feast. They had even bought a pig, butchered it and cooked it in a traditional ground oven style. There was lots of food and in a very atypical fashion they served the women first! (Normally the women do all the work, serve the men children and men first and sometimes there is almost nothing left for the women.) It was a really encouraging time.
We love our church and are so thankful for the wonderful friends who we enjoy being with.
Remember the car accident?
Some of you who have been reading the blog for a while will remember that fateful day in March when Tim got in a car accident. We asked you to pray for a speedy repair and resolution to that situation. Well… nearly 2 months later, we are still waiting for the repair quotes so we can take them to the insurance company. Sigh. All the parts have to come from overseas so it just takes a while to track them all down. We are talking daily to the mechanic to see if we can’t move things along, but it is excruciatingly slow!
Please pray that we will soon get the quotes so repairs can happen. In the meantime we are driving a vehicle that belongs to our group. We pay by the kilometer to use that vehicle. We are thankful to have that option!