¡Viva la Vida!

Birthday Milestone

Today is Zack's thirteenth birthday.  Yes, that's right, we now have a teenage son.  That means we have to pay adult rates at the movies and other events - not to mention the massive increase on our grocery bills as this huge manchild continues to grow!

Zack had a great birthday - celebrating with both sets of grandparents, aunt Jodi & uncle Brett, and lots of cousins at the Atlanta Bread Company in Hickory.  Then we all went to see the Chronicles of Narnia film followed by birthday cake & a merry-go-round ride at Valley Hills Mall.  A very fun way to begin the turbulent teenage years! 

Serendipity

ser-en-dip-i-ty:  The faculty of happening upon or making fortunate discoveries when not in search of them.

I love this word and the meaning behind it.  It's what keeps life interesting.  Yesterday and today we've experienced two serendipitous encounters with interesting people.  Yesterday morning in the hotel in San Jose, Costa Rica the boys and I (Greg) were downstairs in the lobby playing cards just killing time when the fire alarm went off.  A hotel employee told us it was only a drill but still we had to evacuate.  So we went outside to the parking lot and sat on the curb waiting for the drill to be over when we were approached by an American lady and her 3 sons (almost the exact same ages as my boys).  They introduced themselves and soon we learned that they're missionaries from California working in a beach town on the Pacific coast.  As you can imagine, the boys hit it off from the start and later we all congregated by the pool, along with our spouses, where we spent our last hour before heading out to the airport.  Andrew and Hillary have been in Costa Rica for six months and, though they are still working out the language and cultural kinks (aren't we all?), they have such a passion for the gospel to impact Costa Rica.  We exchanged email addresses and invitations to visit so we hope that this relationship of two missionary families will continue.

So this afternoon Jan and I were at the UPS store in Statesville getting a package shipped out and we struck up a conversation with three Mexican men who were also there.  It turns out that these guys are Christians and have a praise band called Pasión.  They attend a Spanish-speaking Assembly of God church in Taylorsville and invited us to fellowship with them tomorrow afternoon.  We talked at length with Isai, Angel, and Mario about what their life is like as extranjeros (foreigners) in the USA.  We said we can definitely relate to that!

So...these are two of our adventures so far in meeting new people and experiencing the serendipitous journey God has laid out for us. 

48 hrs.

Hurray!  After 48 l-o-n-g hours of buses and planes in 3 countries we're safe and sound at my (Greg's) parents' home in North Carolina.  It was 27 degrees F when we arrived in Charlotte last night and we were glad that mom & dad brought lots of coats and gloves. 

We're preaching tomorrow at Stony Point United Methodist Church on "Loving the Immigrant" and showing pics & film clips of our life and ministry in Nicaragua so if you live in this vicinity please come and say hello. 

Three more days until...

It will be a bit of an adjustment to leave the tropics (we are all a bit sunburned from a trip to a pool yesterday!), and go to this! We will be borrowing coats and warm clothes. No point in buying them when we need to buy things that we would use on a regular basis.

Another adjustment will be in the area of crowds and shopping. Just this weekend I was in a mall in Managua and I was a bit overwhelmed with the noise and it was NOTHING compared to the holiday shopping in the US. Last time I was in the US I was a bit overwhelmed just walking into Target on a normal day in May!

The adjustment I am most looking forward to is being near friends and family! 

(and I am also looking forward to the adjustment of having water 24 hours per day!)

Back in October we were planning our church's Rio Coco famine relief trip and we got very excited when we learned that we might be flown up with our supplies in Nicaraguan army helicopters.   Even though it didn't work out for us, the UN World Food Program was able to procure them and flew up to deliver relief aid.

Lottie Moon

Lottie Moon served for 41 years as a Southern Baptist missionary to China. She is honored each year by the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering which goes to the Southern Baptist missions fund. Miss Moon was born on a well to do plantation and educated with undergraduate and masters degrees in education before heading out for China at age 30 in 1870. She served faithfully there until her death by starvation in 1912 - weighing only 50 lbs at her death having given away all she had to aid the starving Chinese. Today we honor Lottie Moon as a wonderful and selfless example of Christ who gave all for others. We pray that her godly legacy will continue to inspire generations of missionaries to go out into the world (including the USA!) with the same passion and compassion she had.

Back to rationing water

Our first dry season here we went more than five months with a few hours per day of water. Last year, we didn't really have to worry about the water turning off. The country seems to have been rationing our water for us between the hours of 11-4 every night for almost a year. Not a time we would usually use water! Three days ago, though, we were surprised with the announcement that until further notice our town would be with water from 4-8 am every day. I wonder what would happen in an average U.S. town if the city turned off the water except for four hours a day? I remember being put on restrictions in the past... we couldn't water our lawns or wash our cars but on certain days. Imagine having your water turned off completely! We have to run around like crazy filling up buckets, barrels, and bins. Quite the inconvenience, really, but you learn to live with it. The abnormal becomes a normal way of life, and you are pleasantly surprised when things go back to the other normal.

"God's great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, [...and even in car breakdowns...] in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common loves. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be. God deals with us where we are and not where we would like to be." (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson, p. 75).  If anyone's looking for a good devotional book then this is it!

Found On Road Dead

... or Fix Or Repair Daily

We were happy to get a car after eighteen months without a car of our own to drive. It was an answer to prayers. It even had air conditioning for about a month or so! Then things started to go wrong. Man, did they ever go wrong. Got a new transmission, pretty cheap actually, and things were okay again for a month or so. Now it has been in the shop three times (still under warranty for the new transmission), and as I write this, Greg is stuck on the side of the road between here and Managua while driving the car home from the mechanic. Transmission fluid pouring out, no gears, no nothing. It is dark, and he is ticked!

WHHHHHYYYYYYYYY????