Monthly Archives: June 2015

We were blessed to make some new friends who had a vacant efficiency apartment available on the day we arrived, so everyone crammed in and crashed in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. Can you find everyone?

It’s been a week since we’ve posted, and life has been very busy here in Kandern. There are so many new tasks to be accomplished in order to be able to settle (both figuratively and legally) into our new lives, and we’ve been systematically taking care of each of those over the last week (and there’s much more to come).

We want to share many of these events with you (well, as many as we believe might be of interest to you) as we go on. But we also want to share with you about everything that happened leading up to our departure. Some of those events were very special to us, and we’d like to share them with you so you can enjoy them, too.

As such, we’re going to try a bit of an experiment in the next weeks: we will continue to post regularly, but we will alternate posts between what’s happening right now, and events that happened in the last month or so before we left. We’ll title the catch-up posts clearly and consistently, so that you know what’s going on, but that’s the plan.

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   We’re finally on the plane! We packed up 17 bags, each weighing 50 pounds (more or less), and headed to the airport. It only took us about an hour to get through checking in and security. We bought pizza, we loaded onto the plane, and now were sitting and waiting.

Please pray as we cross the Atlantic, land in Istanbul, and then transit on to Zürich. We should be arriving in Zürich around 10:30 PM local time, and then we have customs, passport control, and rental cars to sort out. We should be arriving in Kandern around 1 to 2 AM Tuesday morning.

UPDATE 1: We’ve landed well in Istanbul, where they have a lovely airport. We’re taking off to Zurich in a couple hours. The kids did well on the long flight, and were only a little cranky/stir crazy once we’ve landed. All is well so far–Turkish Airlines is very child-friendly, and there were about 2-3 dozen kids on our flight. They even had special kid-oriented goodie bags, with kid-sized slippers, eye covers, socks, etc.

UPDATE 2: We’ve arrived! We managed to get to the rental car counter about 10 minutes before they closed up shop for the night, and got the last two Seat Alhambras they had left. We managed to fit all the checked bags into one of them (photos later) and all the people (except Dale) and the carry-on luggage in the other. We then spent about 30 minutes in the parking garage while we brushed up on our manual-transmission driving for some of the less-experienced drivers in the group…we won’t name names here.

We drove through the rain for nearly 1.5 hours, but we’ve arrived at our only-for-the-next-nine-hours place for the night, an apartment graciously offered by one of the missionary community here in Kandern. We’ll be taking up another temporary residence tomorrow afternoon/evening, where we’ll stay until the house we’re renting is available, around July 1.

Hey guys,

Short note here for those of you who follow the blog but not our Facebook group…I’ve posted a number of items we’re selling in the FB group, for people to see and peruse, and possibly buy…check it out if you can…thanks!

Please Buy Our Things Facebook Album

Also, if you’re not in the group (totally by accident, we tried to add everyone we could imagine) and you want to be, please let us know.

We are excited to share with you that we will be participating in a commissioning ceremony at our home church, Wilcrest Baptist Church, this Sunday, June 7, in the 10:45 am service. It is a very special thing, for a specific manifestation of the body of Christ, the local church, to commission its missionaries as they prepare to be sent out—and we can hardly wait for this Sunday to come so that we can share this moment with our family and friends at Wilcrest.

If you are in the Houston area—even if you’re not a regular attendee at Wilcrest—we’d love for you to come out and participate, too. During the commissioning, we will be doing something that will require audience participation and we think you’ll enjoy it, too.

This is Box 1. It weighs 48.5 lbs, and contains some of the things we’re planning to take to Germany. It currently has 11 siblings, either suitcases or footlockers like this one. Each one has been filled, pressed down, and weighed to the tenth of a pound. There almost certainly will be more.

I’m sitting here in the quiet taking a coffee break…a moment of calm amidst the chaos. It seems like a whirlwind has struck all around me and transformed my nice, quiet life into something exciting and unpredictable. Many of you have asked what is going on with is; when do we leave, what is the plan, how is it going to work, and so forth. My short answer is, “I’m not sure.”

We are prayerfully planning to depart 3 weeks from yesterday. We are making plans and acting like this is what is going to happen. The vast majority of our bags are packed, the local charities and many of our friends and family have been blessed with a large portion of our possessions, and a number of things are in the process of being listed for sale.

This nail-and-hook combo (and the one further behind it on the wall) used to hold a collage of photos of Miranda and Dale from all the places we’ve been blessed to travel. Now we’ve packed away those photos, as we’re being called—once again—to travel far from home.

As I look around my living room, I see the empty nails where pictures once hung. In many ways, it feels like we have dismantled our life here in Houston and we are in limbo before we will begin our new life in Germany. We are excited for this move and for the new role in service to God that will come with it! However, I have experienced a sort of grief as we prepare to leave the familiar. The grief took me by surprise, but I have tried hard to truly experience all of it. When the kids are sad or acting out, we talk about it. I want to take it all in – all that God is leading us through. I want to feel All Of The Feelings and walk this road at the pace that God has placed before me.

This is not always how I have lived. It is my tendency to rush through things to get to what is next. I thrive on excitement and change. I’ve never been a “savor the moment” gal. This time is different. For the last few weeks, Psalm 90 has been my dwelling place:

“Teach us to number our days so that we may truly live and achieve wisdom… With every sun’s rising, surprise us with Your love, satisfy us with Your kindness.  Then we will sing with joy and celebrate every day we are alive” (vs 12, 14)

Entire rooms of my house have only beds inside. In 36 hours, the kids and I will be temporarily moving to my parents’ house so that Dale and some very loving and generous family members can fix, paint, and prepare our house to be rented. We don’t have plane tickets yet because we haven’t reached 100% of our budget. 12 bags sit in my front room weighed and measured for the international flight. Everything is in the air. My natural tendency is to be in panic mode, but I can say with confidence that we are patiently trusting God with the timing and transition of this calling He has placed on our family. My deepest desire is to truly live and achieve wisdom in the path before me today. My walls are empty, but my hands are outstretched and waiting for what God will place in them.