Apologies - we have been remiss in updating

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Greetings, all! Thank you for signing up to get updates and we apologize for the radio silence. You can find a somewhat in-depth description of our moving week here, and the first week of orientation post will follow that one. We are on our second day of our second week here at orientation in VA. While things don’t look the way we expected them to, the Lord knew all of this ahead of time, so we are finding ourselves readjusting our expectations and being patient with the staff as they try their best to work around difficult circumstances. Here are some praises, updates and prayer requests. Again, thank you for partnering with us with your prayer support. We are learning in our sessions about the importance of prayer in missions. Missions, all of life, in fact, cannot be done without prayer!

Praises:

  1. We were retested for Covid this past Friday. The entire family came back negative. My test was botched when they ran it, they had me redo it and it was negative, but the health department found out and asked me to come off campus for a PCR test. The turn around time for testing here is 2-4 days, but we received the negative results in about 36 hours, which allowed us to resume class on Monday, with the rest of the campus here.

  2. Despite the fact that we didn’t pack appropriately for snow (as it’s a bit unusual here), we’ve immensely enjoyed playing in it! It’s fun to have a last chance at this, as it will likely be years until we see snow again. We are using socks for gloves and drying out our boots on the heaters at night.

  3. We are all catching up on sleep! The last two months have been rough in the sleep department, for most of us, but we are catching up on sleep!

Prayer requests:

  1. The first is for contentment in our circumstances. One of the children’s education resource center teachers was exposed to Covid last week, but this didn’t come to light until late last night. We had our first day out of our little apartments and in classrooms yesterday, and received the notification early this morning that today and for the remainder of this week (and most likely next week, as well, if any of the teachers test positive this week) the CERC is closed down. With the boys not able to attend class, we are having to take turns attending the sessions. Sessions usually go from 8-12 and 1-3, but now they are repeating the 8-12 sessions in the afternoon for those with children, so parents can take turns. We are disheartened and discouraged by this, to be sure. If the CERC is closed each time a teacher is exposed, we may be looking at the next 6 weeks of swapping boys while we attend sessions. We were strongly encouraged to not bring school books with us, as they would typically be in class from 8-3, but now with nothing to do, and the weather too cold to play outside for extended periods of time, we find ourselves drumming our fingers, unsure of how to occupy ourselves in the coming weeks.

  2. Please be praying for our personal growth and diligence in our personal devotion time. We fully recognize that walking into cross-cultural life, especially ministry, will be a lot harder if we don’t keep our relationships with the Lord healthy! This is being heavily emphasized in our sessions, but we find that between our early wake-up hours and the business of the day and keeping boys busy while they are out of class, being disciplined to find time with the Lord is a bit more challenging than usual.

  3. There’s some pretty weighty stuff happening on my (Rebekah) side of the family. I can’t go into details about what it is, aside from asking you to please pray for my mom. I know being vague doesn’t help with knowing how to pray, but please just pray with us for her. This weighs heavily on my heart and I find myself distracted by it, often.

  4. There are seemingly countless logistics to moving a family of our size across the world, both for us on this end, and for our team on the other end. Between finding vehicles and housing large enough to fit us and the small things like how to get our homeschool curriculum there, sometimes this all feels like “death by a thousand cuts”. We thank the Lord for his sovereignty, and rest knowing he’s worked the details already. We just wait to see how. We are SO thankful to be going with a company that has been sending folks for 175 years now, and that this is not new to them. They do what they do very well!

Thank you, and may the peace of the Lord be with each of you as you walk through each day with which the Lord has provided!

Grace and Peace!

Rebekah