Friday, May 24, 2013

We're Done With Furlough!

Woot woot! We visited our last church this past Sunday morning. That's 19 churches in 2 months. We are so thankful for everyone's kindness to us while we were on the road. 
{Conestee, SC}
It was great to see many familiar faces that have been so faithful to support us over the past 7 years. We are very thankful for both of our families for taking such good care of us and feeding all of us. Everyone turned their schedules upside down to spend as much time with the grandkids as possible, and we appreciated it!
We are so blessed and I don't want to miss that or any of us miss that in the business of our lives. As a family we are trying to make gratefulness a theme, to consciously make it a point to talk about all that God does in our lives and ministry and praise Him for it. To have the conversations with our kids now that they are old enough to understand so that they will recognize God at work in their lives and give him the glory for it. 
{St.Augustine, FL}
We ran into a couple missionaries that were on deputation. They have been going at it hard for months and months and I know want to make it to their fields soon. It made me go back and remember and be so grateful for God bringing in our support when we were on deputation. I'm thankful that those churches and individuals were so faithful to support us over the years. Anytime we lost some support for whatever reason God would immediately bring someone else or another church along that would take us on and more than make up for the lost. It all is really a beautiful testimony of how God just flat out takes care of His work. 
{The Petzels, who will be coming down in Oct!}
I was taking photos of all of our meetings and then about the time we started getting homesick I stopped, haha! Several weeks ago even Silas started telling us that he wanted to go back to his "new house". He said, "I'm going to go to my new house and play outside with my gun (they shoot bears from the top of their swing set) and you make me breakfast and then you call me (when it's ready), ok?!!!" I'm glad he misses being us. 
{Chestertown, MD}
The goal of this furlough was to present the pastors institute to all of our supporting churches... or at least many of them. We are in need of some startup funds to finishes the rest of the projects before the semester starts and also we were planning on scheduling some mission teams to come down. We did schedule several teams and received a couple other blessings which will be very helpful to our work. I will share those in future posts. 
Thank you to everyone who fed us, put us up in their home or in a hotel, and encouraged us along the way. Thank you for sharing our burden and passion for what God is doing in Petén. And more than anything else, thank you for your kindness to our children! 
Here are a couple more photos from the road. Seriously some of the nicest people you could ever meet are in these pics.
This couple has kids and grandkids on the mission field and they loved on us like we were their own!

Jimmy worked it out to where we got to stop and visit with my beautiful friends Becky and Cate in WV. 
Then in Ohio we got to spend a couple days with my friend Jeannie and meet her newest son Peyton!
{Thrifting!}
{After the creation museum!}
 We also got to see family I hadn't seen in years!
{My Great Aunt Maxine}
{My Uncle John}
Here we went fishing with Bob and Barb Walker, two great soul winners! I always feel honored to be in their presence.

We got to spend several days with Pastor Andy and his family! We are so thankful for them and their constant encouragement.
Thank you to everyone who invited us to their church and listened to what was on our hearts! May God bless you all!

So we are kissing all the hotels, suitcases, and Crackerbarrels goodbye and looking forward to home!


Just a couple more days at Kiki and Papa's house to soak up as much family time as possible, then we're off to Guatemala on Wednesday!

1 comment:

  1. I can imagine how happy everyone will be to get home. And how awesome is that, that home is here in Guatemala? :D

    ReplyDelete

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