Here we go!

Wow ... it really been an unbelievable month and we have been so blessed in so many ways:

• We sold the house! In God's perfect timing, He brought the perfect person along to buy the house. We are so excited for the plans that the new owner has for the house ... knowing that it will be used for ministry makes it so much easier to let go of.
• We are close to having about 50% of our fundraising done!
• Mary Ellen was blessed with a free ticket to the DR so she traveled with the Jupiter Christian School team on March 5th and they helped her take 10 bins of our belongings down - a HUGE blessing! She will spend until the 12th of March doing some more training with Cheryl - another HUGE blessing!
• We participated in our first missions conference as missionaries at our home church - Grace Immanuel Bible Church. Our church family has been such a tremendous encouragement to us!

Our updated time-clock looks something like this:
We will close on the house the last week of March. Provided that all goes according to plan, on April 1st we will begin the journey of our lives! We will leave Palm Beach County, Florida (home for over three decades) and take the next ten days to reach Colorado, stopping to visit family and friends along the way. Cross Cultural training begins at MTI (Mission Training International) in Colorado Springs, on Monday, April 11th.

On Friday, April 29th, MTI finishes and we will fly directly from Colorado to Guatemala to begin five weeks of language school at Centro Linguistico Maya in Antigua, Guatemala. While in the program, we will live with a Guatemalan family and will be fully immered in language learning.

On the 3rd of June, we will return to South Florida to spend a little over a week with family and friends before leaving to head to the DR on the 14th of June! If you are able, please reserve the afternoon of the 11th of June to attend a farewell get-together. We should would love to see you before we leave! We will send out more details as they become available.

Please continue to pray for:

• Our final stage of moving out of our home & our ability to let things go.
• Travel mercies as spend the next couple of months on the road and in the air!
• Our time at MTI and our cross-cultural training.
• Our ability to learn - and RETAIN - Spanish!
• All the goodbye's and see-you-later's we will be having to say.
• 100% funding!

Plans Change AND God is Good!

"The mind of man plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps." 
Proverbs 16:9

We are going to the Dominican Republic.
Our plans were to have the house sold in December.
Our plans were to finish packing and fundraising in January.
Our plans were to be in Guatemala studying Spanish in February.

We are still in Florida. The house hasn't sold. There is still packing and fundraising to do. We are studying Spanish at home through Rosetta Stone. We are still going to the Dominican Republic. Our plan is to be there in June. BUT if we are learning anything through this whole process it is to be flexible, to trust God, and to allow Him to direct our steps. This is surely a lesson that we will learn and relearn (over and over again) on the mission field!

We are trusting God for our next step. We have had lots of traffic on the house in the last week and a possible offer that we are trusting Him for the answer to. Again, it's not what we had planned but we trust that He knows what is best for us. So, I should probably go pack some boxes then work on some fundraising so that I'll be freed up to work on Spanish later this evening.

Unless the Lord has other plans for us ...
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I work better from a list!

Old post from January 11th that I never posted ...
One of the greatest things I learned from working at Jupiter Christian School over the years is that I work better from a list. Making a list isn't something that comes naturally to me, even though I've watched my mother make lists for years. I usually "rediscover" list-making after I've fallen flat on my face. Yesterday was one of those days.

The first thing I did after breakfast was clean the kitchen. I was done in a matter of minutes; off to a good start! The next task on my list was to start going through the stacks of Christmas stuff scattered all over the living room. This isn't like every other year - I can't just stick them back in the 5 large tubs that they've always been stored in. These days everything has to be sorted. The now familiar sorting process that I have adopted goes something like this:

·       Quickly go through and pull out what I absolutely love and don't want to part with

·       Throw away obvious junk

·       Make piles of things to give away (to family, friends, and charitable organizations) 

I had already started sorting through the Christmas things but it was in piles that needed to be packed away and distributed to various family members; doesn't sound like such a big deal but here is my problem. I went out to the garage to get the bag that Melissa stores her Christmas things in and remember that I stripped the bed to wash the sheets. Better go get the sheets. I go get the sheets but before taking them back out to the garage I stop to hang up the sweater and jacket that I brought in from the car the night before. My once sorted closet is a mess again but I refrain from doing anything with it, "I need to stay on track," I tell myself. Okay - sheets in the washing machine - where was I. Oh yeah, Christmas decorations. 

I start putting ornaments, mugs, and household decorations in various boxes for the kids and discover that one of the boxes isn't big enough. Back out to the garage ... what a disaster area ... and I can't reach the box with all the boxes in it so I better sort through this stuff. 

Why in the world was I keeping a bucket of sand? 

I take it out back to dump in the yard and see the wind chime that I've spent the past couple of days refinishing. The only step I have left is to clear-coat it. I grab the wind chime pieces and take them to the garage to spray them since it's too windy out back. I start the clear-coat process, which involves a number of trips back to the garage every 10-15 minutes. Finally the wind chime has the necessary coats, done in sections so that nothing sticks together. In between these trips, I have spent some time checking and responding to email and looking through Facebook. In my defense, my whole purpose for going on the computer was to email some pictures of items I need to get rid of but now I'm feeling like I've gotten off track and am more determined then ever to get back to the Christmas stuff. That’s when I remember that I had started sorting through the stuff in the garage. I walk out to the garage, look around and decide to finish the Christmas stuff and THEN finish the garage.

Finally, the Christmas stuff is in boxes, bins and bags and ready to be distributed or stored. I go to the office where we are collecting all our storage containers and see that I have a couple of bins of gift wrap and craft supplies that I need to go through so I pull those out. But before I can go through those, I stop to fold up the air mattress the kids used when they were here over Christmas that was left on the floor. Oh, and I also need to fold up and put away the sleeping bags that have been airing out back.

The phone rings so I go to answer it and as I'm talking, I look around at the absolute chaos that I have created in the process of trying to “organize” the house. Thankfully, by the end of the day all the Christmas decorations were put away, the gift wrap and craft supplies have been whittled down to one small container to take and one to store, the wind chime is ready to be reassembled and the garage is in good shape!

I think from here on out, I need to work from a list!