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Oklahoma

Well, I have been in Oklahoma for about 2 weeks now but it sure seems like a lot longer. My partner and I meet for about 2 hours each day with our language helper Jerry. He shares Cherokee words with us that we meticulously try to copy down. We will use these words and phrases to analyze the language. After a 2 hour session we are all pretty tired.

Jerry sporting a shirt he received from a previous student

Please pray for Jerry. He claims he is a believer, but one day he told us: "I hope my good works will outweigh my bad and one day God will reward me with the good life." Every day we have him read us a verse in Cherokee and then tell us what it means. Then we discuss it together. Our time together is brief, however, and we have much we need to get done. Please pray that God would illuminate his word and Jerry would understand the truth of salvation.

Memories of Missouri

As we move back to Portland, we are closing another segment in our life. Missouri was an amazing time for our family. The training program that they have at New Tribes is unlike any other. The information we gained during our time in Missouri will help us to be more purposeful and effective on the field. However more than anything else, Missouri was a time that helped us learn our dependency on God. The task that we are called to do is way bigger than we are and there are many ways that I am sure we will mess up and ruin it. We learned, however, that it is not up to us to be perfect or to even bring people to the Lord, it is our job to obey what the Lord has called us too. He will do the rest. I am hoping that we will remember that in times where we feel like giving up, or feel like we have messed things up beyond repair. Even if we never went into missions we would still feel like our time in Missouri was worth while. It taught us so much more than how to be a missionary. It taught us about depending on God and drew us together as a family. We are so excited about the future and the next steps, but we are also grateful for the time that we had.



So what is our timeline....



2010 - 2011 Portland while we work on partnership development and raising support. In the middle of this time Joel will be in Oklahoma for 7 weeks doing a practicum with Cherokee.



Aug 2011 - Lord willing we will leave for France for language study and head directly from there to Senegal.



We are excited to see all that the Lord is going to do in the next year!!!

Pictures of the Boys

Out in the Sun!

We have been enjoying the warm and sunny days when we get them!

Loving the Snow

We don't get snow here often, so this was a treat. It was also nice that it fell over the weekend so we didn't have to miss a lot of school. Ethan really enjoyed sledding down our hill or chasing Joel in the sled. God's creation sure is beautiful!!

Another Semester Begins

There are times that I wonder...What did we sign ourselves up for? We have begun our linguistics course. This course is different from missionary training in a couple of ways. One is that there are afternoon classes as well as morning classes. The second is that there is a lot more homework. We were told the first day that there were only 7 days that we would not have homework and that day was one of them. On top of that Joel has been working on designing an intranet for the training program here. The Intranet is now up and running, so he is spending a lot of time cleaning up the bugs in the system. All of this to say, it is official, it will be a very busy semester. We are going to have to work really hard to make sure that we do not get too overwelmed by things and make sure to take time for our family. God is always at work teaching us new things, I just need to learn to trust him to help us through these times.