Monthly Archives: February 2015

You may see interesting packaging design, bold colors, Texas Tough, or simply the beauty of HEB (it’s a Texas thing), but I see something completely different: There are more garbage bags in this box than we can use in the time we have remaining in Texas. Yikes!

The reality of the fact that we’re about to make an international move hits us in unexpected ways as the target date of our move grows ever-closer. For instance, I went to the grocery store a few weeks ago with a specific list of  required items, including trash bags. Historically, I would simply find the largest package of the right-sized bags, and call it a day, knowing that our large family would eventually use them all up. But as I stood there in the cleaning-products aisle of our local HEB, looking at the box of 100 Tall Kitchen Bags (New & Improved!), I realized that there were more bags in this box than we could use in the time we had left. That brought about feelings of both extreme excitement and sudden panic at the same time.

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These are the tools we most often use now–computer, phone, pen and paper. Oh, and the tea bottle…always the tea bottle.

People always talk about the new year being a time for turning over new leaves, and new beginnings, and all kinds of other new things. As cliche as I find most of those sayings to be, all those and more are true for us this year.

We’ve got a lot of new things going on: Dale has now joined Miranda in working full-time on ministry-related items; we’re focusing on completing our network of financial and prayer partners; we’re beginning the arduous process of unwinding eight years of life spent living in one place; and, finally, we’ve started a new season of lasts as we prepare for a move to Germany later in the year.

A lot of what we’re doing now is reaching out to folks who have expressed an interest in being part of the network of support that God is assembling to help us get to and stay on the field as missionaries. That means we’re making a lot of phone calls, sending a lot of emails, and scheduling LOTS of meetings.

We’re also reaching out to people who want to connect us with their networks of friends, family, and fellow church members, as God may lead them. We will be posting more about how you might be able to be a part of that later this month.

We’ll be doing new things with the blog, too. We will be posting more stuff, more often, than we did last year–at least until we actually leave to go to Germany. And then, we’ll be posting about the process of adjusting to our new other-cultural life there. This means some new feature will be coming to the blog: look soon for a new static page for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs); we’ll also be sharing some of the work our colleagues are producing around the world, so you can get a better taste for what we’ll be doing once we are able to join them.

As you read and explore our new and updated pages, we would ask that you prayerfully consider how God might be leading you to be involved in bringing the Bible to the bibleless.