Monday, January 16, 2012

Where have we been, and what are we doing now?

This can inspire a lot of jabbering, we have plenty of stories to tell! There's nothing worse than wanting to do some casual reading and finding a wall of text, though, so here is where I'm going to put the short version:

August-December: We lived in Waukesha, Wisconsin at New Tribes Bible Institute and graduated. It was a great time of learning and we're glad we did it, but hoo boy was it exhausting!

December-January: We moved from Waukesha back down to Nixa, Missouri where we spent Christmas and New Years' with Gina's parents. We were able to spend some time moving our stuff into our new apartment in Roach, Missouri, where New Tribes has its Missionary Training Center. Also in January we took a quick jaunt down to Sanford, FL, where Ben's family lives. It was an awesome visit and really sweet to see everyone. We definitely miss them tons. Okay there's a necessary rabbit trail here - We have decided to pursue missionary training mainly for a couple of reasons:

  -We learned things about the gospel and about our relationship with Christ that we cannot ignore, or live without sharing.
  -We feel that God has led us here partly by excluding the availability of other options.
  -We are willing to, where others might not be.
We realize that these don't sound like super "missionary-like" motivations, and it makes us a little self-conscious to be training with so many others who seem to have a laser-focus toward one field of service or another, but we know that we will certainly learn much here.

So tomorrow, we start official 'missionary training.' We'll be learning how to teach the Bible in a cross-cultural setting, how to learn, write, and teach in languages that don't yet have an alphabet, and all sorts of other great stuff.

More to come later, I have promised myself to get better at blogging.