My wife made this Thanksgiving decoration by putting these painted parts into a local food much like a Yam called Kaukau. Our family has been debating over it's name.
Kendal and Sydney like: Tur-cow-key
Chad likes: Tur-cow-cow-key
Calvin likes: Cow-key
2 Weeks of meetings complete!
For the past two weeks I have been involved in leadership meetings where we make decisions regarding the direction of our work in this country.
We are the group of people tasked with representing the over 350 members and their opinions.
We usually meet 4 times a year, and bring together the ideas of these
350 people and find ways to strategically aim our efforts towards Bible translation.
Often this means going into a lot of nitty-gritty detail and documentation, long discussions, and difficult decisions that in the end are sometimes hard to communicate.
Many of you know that communication is my passion, and so it wouldn't surprise you that I found myself up in front of the podium for part of a public meeting explaining the decisions that had been made during the meeting.
Though improving communication is my passion, I've also enjoyed being a behind-the-camera kind of guy. Part of my training to come to PNG has been public speaking preparation, and I honestly don't get too nervous about speaking in front of people.
The only part that makes me nervous is my desire to be sure that my love for these people I support with my work comes through my words.
Sometimes in the detail you can get lost from the bigger picture.
I feel good about the decisions we made in this meeting, and there are 2 significant praises.
The first is that I made it all the way through. I missed the last of these meetings because I was medivac'd.
Today was the final day of meetings, and not only that, I wrote the check that allowed us to pay for the medivac that had me missing the last meeting.
Though this puts us flush, and out of debt now (THANK YOU TO EVERYONE)
it has completely emptied all of our accounts. So the good news is,
we've booked and paid for our flights home on furlough, and we've paid for our medivac debt. The bad news is, we have no safety cushion. So if something around the house breaks, or we have another medivac, we will be in very bad shape.
Another praise is that turning 40 was fun and enjoyable. It has been a crazy 2 weeks, I shoulder a significant extra load of work during these
2 weeks as the secretary, any current action item list is so long it'll take me weeks to accomplish... but I feel good about it and not overwhelmed!
Prayer points:
-Finance - we have been tightening the belt, so-to-speak regarding things we need, in an effort to save money for paying off our debt. That means we don't have some things we need, and have been working around them. Our home printer broke, so my daughter has been having to take her homework elsewhere to print it. We could use a nicer cushion so we felt free to buy a new printer.
-Guest - we will be celebrating U.S. Thanksgiving today with a new
(temporary) family member. Stacey is a 14 year old PNG 9th grader who needs a place to stay. Her parents work remotely at Bible translation and can not afford for Stacey to live near the school. We have agreed to take her in until the remainder of the school term. She is sharing a bedroom with Sydney. She's very polite, a good athlete and a good student. It's been nice to have family conversations with her about her faith and about her life. Please pray that our family would be a blessing to her.
Thank you for your continued prayers and support!
