hey everyone, a quick blog update here for you guys…

This morning we will be in Friendswood, visiting Miranda’s  childhood church, Baybrook Baptist Church. Afterwards, we will be driving up to the Waco area.

We will be at Grace Memorial Baptist Church, in Clifton, Texas, tonight at 6:30 PM. We will be sharing with Grace Memorial Baptist, as well as Spring Creek Baptist, and sharing dessert and coffee with them. If you’re in the area and you’d like to see us, and/or hear what God is doing in our family through Wycliffe, please come out and join us! I

FBC Anahuac was my (Dale’s) first true body of fellowship. I learned a lot there about what it meant to be Christ embodied.

My family moved to Anahuac, Texas, around Christmas of 1986. I had just turned 6, and was in the middle of first grade. Anahuac was (and, to a certain extent, still is) a sleepy small town down in the river bottoms and swamps, somewhere between Houston and Beaumont, well off the beaten path of I-10. You don’t get to Anahuac by accident.

Soon after we arrived, we began attending church with my mother at First Baptist Anahuac, and I grew up there, both physically and spiritually. Sitting in the wooden pews in the sanctuary, surrounded by the late-1970s split-pea-soup-green carpet, I heard Jesus call me to be His. My understanding of what it meant to be a Jesus-follower grew as I sat in the Sunday School classes, Royal Ambassadors sessions, and youth group meetings. But a building is not a church, any more than a house is a family.

Continue reading →

After a long day of tree-planting, the Peacock kids (Nightcrawler, Phoenix, Cyclops, Wolverine & Beast) pause for a moment with their shovels.

As we get closer to our departure from the US to Germany, we have been taking stock of the nature of the relationships we currently have, and what we pray those relationships will be like when we return in four or five years. We’ve also spent a lot of time over the last three years considering how we’re preparing our children for a nomadic lifestyle—particularly regarding helping them to understand the connection they have to their “passport” country.

In what is possibly the best book out there on the topic of “third culture kids” (Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, Revised, by Pollock and Van Reken), we read some advice from a father to his daughter to “plant her trees” wherever she was. That single piece of advice stuck with me, resonating strongly. We want our kids to have roots, to understand that wherever it is that God takes us, we will always have a place to call home in Texas, with our friends and family.

Continue reading →

This is a short update to let everyone know three related-but-not-really-all-that-related items.

First, we have a brand new feature of the blog–Peacocks on the Move! There is a link in the menu at the top of the page for a calendar listing of all of our speaking engagements and other activities we’ve got going on. As soon as we are able to firm up the details of an event, we’ll post them there. We currently have 4 items listed.

Also, we have another new feature on the blog–our Current Partnership Status chart. You can see this in the right-hand navigation panel next to these posts. We will update this item regularly, as we have new partners come on-board, so that you can track our progress along with us, as well as pray that God would bring new partners into our team.

And, as you’ll see when you visit the Peacocks on the Move link above, the first two items listed have to do with our trip this weekend to Waco.

Our long-time friends and current Waco residents (David & Lydia Tate, and CJ Wood) are hosting a brunch in our honor tomorrow morning. If you’re in the area (or driving in, like some of our friends from Houston and Dallas areas are doing), we’d love for you to attend.

We’re also joining David & Lydia at their current church on Sunday morning.

Thanks, and have a great Friday!

We paused for a group shot on the observation platform at 40-Acre Lake at Brazos Bend State Park. Did you notice the photo-bomber in the background?

One of the things we rarely discuss publicly is the sometimes grinding nature of the work we’re doing in this season of our lives—we’re striving to complete our partnership network, we’re getting ready to leave one country while attempting to establish a home in another, everyday we’re ripping off the “good-bye” Band-Aid in slow-motion a few more hairs at a time, and most of this has to be done right now.

All of this activity and uncertainty can add up to a lot of stress in the Peacock home, so this week we did something about it—we went to hang out with the gators at Brazos Bend State Park. We spent three days and two nights camping there, focusing on our spending time with the family and having fun—and I think we did a good job.

Continue reading →

While we were in North Carolina late last year, we found this in a display in one of the meeting halls. These cabinets contain one copy of each of the New Testaments completed by Wycliffe-associated translators since our founding.

I read a blog post today from a guy named Adam Ford. His work is frequently funny, sometimes pointed, and more often than not, thought provoking. Today’s work was no different. In it, he rightly acknowledges the role that William Tyndale played in bringing God’s word to a specific language group, despite intense and life-ending opposition, nearly 500 years ago. If you’re not familiar with the impact of his life on the Bible(s) you read today, please find out more about him–and those who’s work led the way for his own–as soon as you can.

I praise God that direct, unfettered, and immediate access to God’s word in my heart language has been a reality for me and my ancestors going back all the way to the 1600s. And I thank Him for men (and women) like William Tyndale and John Wycliffe. But that blog post made me wonder what people might be saying about the Bible another 100, 200, or 300 years from now–who might whole language groups thank God for when that time comes?

Continue reading →

I sat there, on the well-worn aluminum floor, as the tiny Cessna climbed and climbed and climbed. Here I was, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate smack-dab in the middle of Mississippi cotton fields and ambling ribbons of forest, climbing higher and higher, as the nearly deafening engine droned into the cabin.

In my mind, two thoughts fought for supremacy: The first, “Am I really doing this?” was the voice of reason. “I’m really doing this!” was the voice of expectant, hopeful adventure.

We hit our mark, nearly two miles high, and my second-cousin-turned-skydiving-instructor, to whom I was securely attached in no fewer than five locations, gave me the signal. We stood up together, shuffled closer and closer toward the open hatch at the side of the plane.

There was a moment, a millisecond-long frame frozen in my mind, when toes hung out over the threshold–we were at the literal tipping point–where we were to either commit or give up, to pursue the adventure we agreed to pursue or to sit down and bail.

With one final glance at the dive coordinator, thumbs up and smiling, we rolled out into the nothingness–out of the relative safety of our tiny crop duster, now at the unflinching mercy of the laws of physics and fluid dynamics.

Today, our whole family is at another of those crossroads, a go-or-no-go moment in our lives, as we pursue the calling God has given us to join Him in His mission. We have been on this journey for some time now, and it is time that we jump fully into what God has for us. We feel the urgency, we understand the need, and we long to be working in the places He’s created for us.

Today, March 12, 2015, we are entering a new period in our partnership development process–we are kicking off a campaign to complete 100 percent of our financial partnership needs within the next 100 days.

Continue reading →

Quick blog post/update for everyone out there….tonight, Wednesday, March 4, we have the honor of being asked to speak at Brenham’s First Baptist Church.

If any of you are in the area, and you want to stop by to visit or to hear about how God is moving in really cool ways to bring us into His mission, please come by.

The address is: 304 North Market Street, Brenham, TX 77833. We’re speaking

We’d love to see you there tonight!

P.S. – for the record, we might or might not also be stopping by this place, to get some of this. I’m just sayin’.

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.

Continue reading →

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.