Yes, after many years of refusing to give our prayer letter a quirky title I finally gave in to peer pressure… Hey everyone else is doing it, right?
You can check out the “exciting” version with images Right Here.
Below is the slightly less exciting plain text version:
Dear friend,
Hello again from Missouri! Until part way through last semester, we thought we would be settling back into Wisconsin right now. As it turns out, we get to “miss out” on another Wisconsin winter.
When we started the training program we were always planning on going through the three semester program. Then we started hearing about the Linguistics course (an extra semester and a half where you dig into the nitty gritty of breaking down language so that you can more effectively learn, write and translate in it). It sounded fascinating, but it also sounded like another large chunk of time, and that wasn’t that appealing. Given the health problems that my (Stacy’s) dad was experiencing at the time, we didn’t think it would be wise to take that time out, not knowing how much time we would have together. We went back and forth on whether we should stay for the learning opportunity, and eventually settled on, “Unless God makes it clear that we need to go back to Missouri, we’ll plan not to.” And that was that.
Then, last semester happened. During my dad’s last days on earth we were all together as a family in Wisconsin. It was a blessed, difficult, stretching time for us as a family, and though they were hard, we wouldn’t trade them for anything. It was hard to say goodbye, despite knowing that for us, the separation isn’t for forever. After the memorial service we came back down to MTC and finished up our graduating semester.
We had missed some classes while we were in Wisconsin, that we needed to make up. There were a few different options available, but one of the simplest was for us to come back this semester, allowing me to do Linguistics while Michael made up the classes that we missed. So here we are, preparing for another semester… a semester that we were not planning for (but God was).
Please pray for us as we begin this next little “detour” on our journey:
- Pray for our family as we continue to adjust to the loss of a dearly loved husband/father/grandfather. God is good even in the face of grief, but it can still be hard.
- Pray for Stacy’s mind to stay sharp – Linguistics is known to be a challenging class
- Pray for our kids – that we would model Christ for them, and their hearts would continually be softened to Christ.
- Pray for us as we work on lots of paperwork to be accepted to a field. Hopefully we will be sharing where God is taking us soon!