Settling In

I keep getting asked, "How are the kids adjusting to school? Are they okay? Are you settled into the house?" Questions that are nearly impossible to answer without a long (and probably incomprehensible) explanation. I find myself wondering how much they really want to know about our daily emotions and joys, victories and struggles, and usually settle with a superficial, and not entirely honest, "We're doing okay."

The Mission House: our home for the next year.

How do I enter into a culture that I said  good-bye to nearly twenty years ago? True, I spent more than two years here when the twins were born, but my focus we different then - Kevin was in school, I had two newborns and was homeschooling the others in Georgia. Now four are in school, Daniel is doing internet school, Kevin is home and we're living in Maryland - quite a contrast!

So are we settling in? Well no, not really. For me, I've had to acquire so many things to practically manage life here, and I have none of my normal things. I burned the rice and the popcorn because I'm not familiar with how an electric stove, Corningware and different pots interact. The three different schools that we are connected to are all so electronically oriented, and we don't always know how to access information that we need. We spend a lot of time feeling lost and rather overwhelmed.

How are the kids doing? Pretty good, actually. They seem a bit happier with school now that it is actually in session. They are getting involved in some activities (which is, unfortunately, part of our stress) and some are making friends (in spite of one's declaration that she won't make any friends because then she'll have to say good-bye to them). They even ate most of the popcorn and are generally patient with my learning to cook again.

As we struggle to find our place in this foreign home that we've returned to, I'm reminded that Jesus entered into a foreign culture as well, stepping out of Heaven and entering in to this world. He lived in this world, went to school here, interacted with all sorts of different people, and regularly challenged the culture around Him while still loving and caring for everyone He encountered. I don't know if He was ever really comfortable here, but He was able to overcome that unsettledness and serve those He came to serve.

So, if He is to be our model, I guess the answer to the question, "Are you settled in yet?" has to be "No." And that answer isn't likely to change this side of Heaven. But that's okay, as long as we continue, in His strength, to love and serve those He has put in our path, wherever we happen to be today.

In the Mountains of Virginia

Sitting down to dinner last night with Bradley at Liberty University, surrounded by his "hall" (guys from his dorm building, along with the girls from their "sister" dorm), God placed in front of us two more MK's for him to meet and start getting to know. I say two more because earlier that day, Bradley had met another one as well. Isn't it great when how God can lay a path or provide new friends before you even get to a place?

When planning this trip to Lynchburg  to help Bradley get settled back into life at college, we were reminded that Wycliffe Associates has a hospitality roster which often has been a source of great blessing and fun for our family. The people on this list open their homes to Wycliffe missionaries who are traveling through the area, giving them a place to stay and often some meals at no cost. We searched for one in the Lynchburg area and, out of many choices, were led to pick the home of Peter and Susan Crabtree.

Here are a few of the things we didn't know about them when we first called them:

- They have a great heart for missionary kids!

the view from the back porch

- They live 14 miles from Liberty University, up in the mountains - it is beautiful here!

- Susan works at Liberty and can be a continuing source of encouragement for Bradley.

the view from the back porch

- They have a chocolate lab named Toblerone (Toby for short) which will make one little girl in our family very happy when we all get to come back.

Yes, that's right, when we all come back. Did I forget to mention that they also have a six bedroom house that is big enough to fit our whole family whenever we want to come visit Bradley?

Our God is so great!

Introducing The Blueberry

As many of you know, we've been praying for many months for a solution to our vehicle problem. We have a van here in the States which seats seven people. The problem is, for the time that Josiah will be with us (which is likely to be several months, at least) we have eight people to transport. So, we were facing the possibility that we would need to drive two cars any time we wanted to go somewhere as a whole family, but we only had one car.

So, we've been praying that God would provide us with either a small, fuel efficient second car or a vehicle  that is big enough to hold all eight of us. And for months, the answer has been, "Wait." Even though we were offered a few vehicles to purchase, we never felt peace about moving forward with any of them.

Then, about a week ago, God moved. Lori's father got an email from a friend of a friend about someone who was selling an eight passenger van (it can actually hold 15, but the back two benches have been taken out, leaving lots of luggage space). We emailed the owners, talked to them a bit on the phone and decided that this was the van for us. We explained our situation to them as we started discussing price and payment options, and they phoned us to say, "We've decided that we just want to give the van to you." That's right; they wanted to GIVE it to us!

The Blueberry

So, on Thursday, August 2, we picked up our new van, drove it to the DMV and got it titled, then loaded it up with all of our belongings and, on Friday morning, drove it north toward Baltimore, where we'll be staying for the year.

Though the picture doesn't show it very well, the van is a light blue, so Lori quickly christened her The Blueberry, because she is big and always full. She got us safely up to Maryland without any trouble, and we are confident that she will serve us well for as long as we need her.

But most importantly, we are so thankful that God provided in such a mighty way exactly what we needed, exactly when we needed it and in a way that was such a wonderful blessing for us. We truly serve a mighty and loving God, and we can always rest assured that He knows our needs and will do whatever it takes to make sure all those needs are met. All we have to do is trust Him and wait on His perfect timing; He'll take care of the rest.

And we've got the Blueberry to prove it!

One Little Vowel

New Testaments in Cameroonian languages.
These are some of the language projects that our ministry has helped to support.

Below is a story from the Wycliffe US President Bob Creson. The translators involved, Lee and Tammi Bramlett are friends of ours from their days in Cameroon; Kevin had the privilege of teaching two of their four children, and our family was able to visit them for a short time in their village home among the Hdi people. We hope you will be encouraged by this story of how God encoded His love for the Hdi people in an amazing place, and how He led Lee and Tammi to discover it for them.

Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. Where was the footprint of God in the history or daily life of these Cameroonian people?  What clue had He planted to let the Hdi know Who He was and how He wanted to relate to them?

Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for love. Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?

Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, "Could you 'dvi' your wife?"  "Yes," they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.

"Could you 'dva' your wife?" "Yes," they said. That kind of love depended on the wife's actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.

"Could you 'dvu' your wife?"  Everyone laughed. "Of course not!  If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say 'dvu.' It just doesn't exist."

Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, "Could God 'dvu' people?"

There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded. "Do you know what this would mean?  This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people."

One simple vowel and the meaning was changed from "I love you based on what you do and who you are," to "I love you, based on Who I am. I love you because of Me and NOT because of you."

God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into their language. For centuries, the little word was there-unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question their entire belief system. If God was like that, and not a mean and scary spirit, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.

The New Testament in Hdi is ready to be printed now, and 29,000 speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25:  "Husbands, 'dvu' your wives, just as Christ 'dvu'-d the church..."  I invite you to pray for them as they absorb and seek to model the amazing, unconditional love they have received.

Around the world, community by community, as God's Word is translated, people are gaining access to this great love story about how God 'dvu'-d us enough to sacrifice his unique Son for us, so that our relationship with Him can be ordered and oriented correctly. The cross changes everything!  Someday, the last word of the last bit of Scripture for the last community will be done, and everyone will be able to understand the story of God's unconditional love.

How to Pack Your Entire House and Change Continents

Here's a bit of a timeline describing what we've been up to for the last few weeks:

June 11 - 15

This was the final week of school at RFIS. Kevin spent most of the week giving and grading exams, as well as writing comments on report cards. The children spent the week taking exams and cleaning out their lockers, as well as beginning the process of saying good-bye to all their friends. On Thursday night of this week, Josiah graduated from high school, which was a great event. On Friday, we all attended the Senior Open House, which is a time in the afternoon for people in the community to say good-bye to the graduates and anyone else who might be going on furlough, like us. This was the last time that some of our kids had to see and say good-bye to several of their friends.

June16

The day of frantic packing. Several friends came over in the morning and we took apart and moved out almost all of the furniture in our house in preparation for our furlough. Most of the furniture went into a storage container on one of the centers, though some is being used by various people during the time we'll be in the States. In the midst of all our packing and moving, we also dropped off our two dogs to the two places that they will be staying while we are in the States, one to the Naine family and the other to RFIS (she'll be one of the "watch" dogs at school for the year). We settled for dinner that night in a friend's house (she was heading to a nearby city that day, so she offered to let us use her house for our last days in the country, a HUGE blessing!) with our house about 2/3's empty and the family pretty much exhausted. On Saturday night, we said good-bye to Josiah as he headed to Europe to meet four of his friends for a bike trip from Holland to Italy and back.

June 17 - 19

The completion of the frantic packing. Unfortunately, we didn't finish clearing out our house on Saturday, so Kevin and Lori went back on Sunday afternoon after church and continued the process for another few hours, taking a few more loads to the storage container and trying to organize the things that were left so that Lori and Daniel could finish the job on Monday morning. Kevin would not be helping with the move on Monday because he had to go back in to school for end of the year meetings.

Kevin's meetings went a bit better than the packing; though Lori and Daniel managed to get a great deal done, they weren't able to finish it all, and we went to bed Monday night still with stuff in three houses. Tuesday, Kevin went to school for half a day while Lori worked to eliminate the stuff we had in one of the other centers, where we had stored it in hopes of selling some of it; we did sell a great deal, but still had a fair bit to pack up. Kevin got back from school near 10:00, helped Lori and Daniel finish the packing and got all the rest of the stuff out of the houses and into the storage container. While they were working on that, Kaiah and Caleb were at the house where we were staying busy packing our suitcases for the flight to the States. The two of them packed every one of our bags, and if they hadn't managed to do that, we probably would have missed the flight!

In the early afternoon, we took time out for a wonderful "last supper" with some friends down the road, then, at about 4:30 in the afternoon, we piled into a van driven by some other friends and headed to the airport to check in; we took off at about 8:00 PM and started the long journey toward the United States.

June 19 - 20

Travel, travel, travel, travel, travel! We visited five different cities on three continents in the space of about 40 hours of travel, from the time we left home in Cameroon to the time we arrived home on Lookout Mountain in Georgia. Overall, these 40 hours were uneventful, which is always a very huge blessing. At the end of the journey we were joined by all of our checked luggage (a very good thing!) and a sweet reunion with Bradley, our oldest son, and Lori's parents in the Atlanta airport.

June 20 - 22

We spent a few days resting and visiting with Lori's parents on Lookout Mountain (as well as reorganizing all of our luggage). Then, we headed east to Athens, GA where we took up temporary residence at the Snows Mill Guest House, a wonderful house set up like a bed and breakfast but available free of charge to missionaries who are connected with certain ministries, Wycliffe among them. So, we moved in to the guest house and got ready to spend the next month resting, playing and having fun together as a family (though still without Josiah, who was spending these days beginning his bike trip through Europe).

June 22 - July 23

We spent a very restful and enjoyable month at the guest house in Athens, playing and spending time as a family. We shopped a bit, took walks through the woods and at various local parks, enjoyed a wonderful 4th of July fireworks display, went swimming at a local pool, and played lots of games here at the house. We also had a chance to connect a bit with a great church here in the area, Faith Presbyterian Church, which was a wonderful blessing for all of us. Overall, a very nice month.

Today, the 23rd, we are finishing packing up all of our stuff and getting ready to head north again for a rather short visit in Chattanooga with the folks in that area. If you are nearby, drop us a line; we'd love to get together if we can!




Stay tuned for more updates on our various wanderings!

Bible Translation in Cameroon

A recent broadcast of the 700 Club had a segment describing the work of Bible translation that is happening here in Cameroon. CBN news has graciously allowed us permission to post this clip here on the blog, so please take a few minutes to see some of the wonderful sights of our "home" and also to get a very good summary of the work of Bible translation that you are a part of, through your support of our work here.

If the video above does not work, feel free to check out the full broadcast at: http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/archive/club/700club030912_ws .  The segment on Cameroon begins at about minute 17.

(video posted here courtesy of CBN News; used with permission)

Introducing Marie Noel

I love how God provides for us in ways that are so much better than what we would do for ourselves.

Recently I was looking for someone new to help me in the home. Our old househelp, Emma, just had a baby girl and will now stay home. When she is ready to come back to work, we are praying that God will provide a new job for her, one that she can continue with after we go on furlough in June. When we began looking for someone to take her place, I thought I knew who it was that God had lined up for me. After all, the timing was right as far as I could see, I could communicate with her and she has years of experience so I could get lots done for furlough packing. But no, every time I pushed on that door it became closed again. I really didn't want to try an inexperienced, French speaking young lady in my home at this time. Didn't God get that? Well, He did. And He knew better. 

 

Let me introduce Marie Noel; married, mother of 2 year old twins, delightful, worshiping, inexperienced, eager to learn, efficient, and get this: She understands what I'm asking for in my broken, childlike French! So far, she has been exactly what we needed, and we are very thankful that God provided in ways that we didn't look for!