Blessings

This week has been a mix of great anxiousness and great blessings. I am of course reminded of Philippians 4:6;

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

As faithful as I feel sometimes this is hard for me. I am a person who believes that I can make most anything happen and have been humbled by God many times as a result, some lessons have been quite painful. Anyway, this week have been telling friends and coworkers of our intent to move to Africa and have been met with mixed emotions. All are happy, few are surprised and some are heartbroken. Such was one today. We actually told a close friend last night and after the initial "I knew it would come" and an attempt at a strong outward "happiness" I was met this morning by pure emotional heartbrokeness. During the course of the day, many of my coworkers asked many questions about the work we want to do, were we were going to live and about support. We talked about all of these. During our talk about money the subject of how much money we needed came up and then "what will you spend that money on" was the inevitable next question. I told them about how we had to have new major appliances because we did not have 220 volt appliances here in the states and that Africa had 220 outlets. I also mentioned that my computers were very old and at this age, had small storage and were unreliable. We talked about other things like mattresses, couches, expenses for shipping containers, school for the kids and vehicles.

Well this evening our friend called and asked to bring dinner over and when she arrived gave me and Kristin each cards. In the card, besides tidings of love, were checks. In mine was enough money to buy a new Mac computer and in Kristin's was a check for enough money to buy all the major appliances we will need in Africa. I would like to say that I was stunned but I have to say that I have always been blessed by her love and generosity for our family and was not surprised by the great gifts. We praise God for her generosity and ask God to bless her spirit with peace.

Back But Ready To Go

Well, we have arrived home safe and we now have or at least know the location of all our luggage. We have suffered greatly from jet lag. We are cranky. If you think and adult is difficult to deal with when tired and jet lagged, you should see an 8 year old. We did not get along well yesterday.

We at least made it home safe. Now that we are home we have been anxiously preparing our first mail out for our mission to Rwanda. We have been writing letters, making budgets and praying.

We have began making lists and planning for our move and the details that need to be taken care of to make our move safe and successful. I thought I was a list person but now I am in overload. It is almost fun but at the end of the day, fun is not quite the right word. We pray that God will give us endurance and help us be complete and diligent.

I have begun to inform our friends family and coworkers of our plans and I can say it is aging me. Every time I have to sit down with a coworker, administration or friends, I get chest pain. We have been met by so many different levels of reactions. We have been mostly overwhelmed by repeated encouragement and words of encouragement. It is blessed to hear so many people say, we knew this day would come or, I already knew this would happen. It is so great to see that we have been seen as the people we have tried to be. This is a testimony to the Lord and His presence in us. We pray that His amazing spirit will continue to abide in us. We continually seek prayers from each of you and ask that you will remind others of our need for prayer.

God bless.

Ready to Go

Well, it's time to go. The Neal's (Don and Jane) are arriving soon to pray with us for our trip. We have been so blessed by their encouragement, as we have all of you, and we are so happy that they asked to come to the house this morning to pray over us.

I can hardly believe this step has arrived. The Cashes seem to be in such need of distraction. We hope God will give them encouragement while we are there. We hope we can adequately express the love that Glenwood has sent with us.

We are asking God to show us the need he has for us in Rwanda. We have asked God to let this trip be a learning trip, not a deciding trip. We have made our decision but God will make this trip what he wants. We have asked God to put us in the hands of others who are ministering to the Rwandans and to show us how we can provide love and hope to the people of Ruhengeri. We will be driving to Ruhengeri on March 18 and will need your prayers. We will be praying for the city and the people who live there and ask God to make us a safe home there.

God bless you all and thank you for your prayers.

Almost ready

Well, we are on the final countdown. I have one more day of work this week. We have began our packing. Kristin is awesome. She has packed each kid for each leg of their trips. Samuel went to my mom's house this weekend. Madelyn and Aaron will go to Kristin's parents tomorrow. Madelyn will get picked up by my mom in OKC next week. Grace will spend 3 days at Avon Adam's house then join us in our trip to Africa. Kristin planned and packed for each leg of each person's trip in addition to packing us for Orlando on Thursday followed immediately by the flight to Africa. We have packed 8 trunks for Africa, too many. It will cost us. We have been putting stuff in the trunks like puzzles. I suppose it is good practice for our own mission.

In the end we are ready and tired. We will overcome.

At this point Grace is more excited to stay at Avon's home that the trip to Africa.

In regard to our mission. We have been praying for God to show his continual faithfulness and show us some areas that he is going to support our family. Over the weekend he has given us confirmation that two churches are going to give us financial support for Rwanda. We don't know the dollar amounts yet and are still praying for this part. We are still praying for good people and good churches to step up and commit assistance to fill the needs that are remaining after these commitments.

Please pray with us for these issues. Pray for our children while we are gone. Please pray for our trip. Pray for the Cashes.

Getting Ready

Well, it has been a while since adding to my blog. Bad for me, I know. It has been a difficult couple of weeks. Ask any doctor who admits to Trinity Mother Francis what their week was like. The hospital is busting at the seams. There were, on average, 23 people spending their stay in the ER rather than in a regular room because there was no room in the inn. Three of those were mine during the week before last. It would have been four but the last one was 12 and we had to find her a room since she was a minor. (no pediatric trained nurses in the ER). In addition to that my online bible class at Harding continued pile on the work. I was overwhelmed by the work and it showed. By the grace of God I was able to keep afloat by doing 2 weeks worth of homework before I started call. This was going great until last Sunday night when I realized that I did not have a 10 question quiz over Colossians 3 and 4 on that Wednesday but it was "Test 2" with 100 questions over Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians. Oh well. God granted me more knowledge than I needed. It is hard to settle for less than 100% when you've been to Medical school. I did have to settle.

We are nearing our trip to Uganda and Rwanda. We are flying to Uganda on March 10 and staying with the Cashes until March 17. We are going from the Cashes to Kigali Rwanda on March 17 and will be visiting the Jenkins, Shewmakers and hopefully the Beards while in Kigali. I hope to meet with some of the people in the Ministry of Health for Rwanda to see if there is a way for me to use my medical training in Rwanda. We will go to Ruhengeri for a couple days by car (kind of excited to drive in Rwanda, don't tell Kristin that I'm excited; it kind of worries her). When we get to Ruhengeri we will try to meet with Drs. Caleb and Louise King who are doctors in the Musanzi region. They are about an hour south of Ruhengeri. I want to see how their work is set up and by the end of the trip I would like to see if God wants to use me a pure church planting capacity or in partially or wholly medical mission manner. I truly have no idea how this will look later in the future.

We are excited about the whole trip but need prayers for endurance, especially for our daughter Grace. We pray that she will love it. She has no clear idea that we are going to move to Rwanda but she knows we have been talking about spending more time with the Koonces and Crowsons and we have asked her about whether she is interested in living near them. She seem skeptical but she is not stupid and gives us hints that she thinking about the things we have been discussing in "code" the last few months.

We really want to be blessings to the Cashes and we want to receive so much blessing from them. We hope God will show us a vision of the faith that keeps them in Uganda.

We have not started packing but will likely do so tomorrow. We are excited by the challenge of making all 6-9 trunks weigh 50 lb. It is like a puzzle. I hate puzzles.

We need prayers for
Endurance
self control
safety
vision of God's purpose for our mission
vision to see what is real in Rwanda and not let Satan cover our minds and the eyes of our hearts with false images of superficial contentment in the Rwandan people. We want to see the pain and the suffering, we want to see the emptiness and the pain that the genocide brought.
We hope that we will take your prayers with us and hope God will hear you and remind us of each person praying for us so that we can also pray for you.

Shots, shots and more shots

I am tired this week. We have began making plans for our first trip to Uganda and Rwanda. We are certainly excited but to say the least overwhelmed. This week started the shots. Shots, shots and more shots. To say the least, Grace is reconsidering her excitement about traveling to Africa. Madelyn could get hit by a truck and brush it off but Grace; Imagine a very large nurse with a needle in one hand and a determined look on her face, wildly poking at a moving target that is Graces arm with my hand around it. The odds of the needle going into her arm rather than my hand is not 1:1. My hand is in serious danger and I just had the same immunization and I certainly don't want it again, in the back of my hand. We made it. She is now immune to Meningococci. Near fatal death if caught by a teenager but fatal if caught by an 8 year old. The argument, It will be good for you in the long run did not help matters.
I have been continuing my class on the Prison Epistles online at Harding. I absolutely love it. I was sitting on a plane coming back from San Diego after a weekend plagued by delayed and canceled flights, and I realized that I had actually been reading my bible and my text for about 10 hours. I found joy in this. I do not boast because I have to say most of the time was re-reading what some British commentator had to say about Philippians. He doesn't write the way I talk. I can understand why some people get so excited about the depth of this kind of study. I can tell that I already have more confidence and ability to speak God's word (not really very good at it). I find that filling a half hour at bible study is easier. Part of this is that over the last 3 months I have continually prayed for God to give me a greater gift for speaking his word out loud to others. I'm not a great speaker nor a great student of the word but God has energized me through the deep meaning of his word. The pace at which one is expected to read the textbooks and write papers is nearly overwhelming. I certainly need prayers for this. Oddly enough I have been fasting directly for this issue and even my patients ask nearly every day if I have lost wt. Don't know how you can tell in a man who was already at 136.
Our prayer requests are for our trip to Africa. We want to be an encouragement for the Cashes. We ask that we will not be a burden on the Cashes. We ask for a safe flight. We pray that God will connect us to the other missionaries in Rwanda the way he has to the Koonces and the Crowsons.
We ask for prayer for fund raising. We pray for people and churches who can first pray for us and then pray for their giving. We ask God to provide for us in a stable way during our commitment. We pray that God will move churches and people in the year to come and prepare them financially for this giving. We have been in contact with multiple churches and ask that the Holy Spirit will weave our path in with theirs.
We continue to ask for prayers for our families as they are still trying to grasp this entire issue. They are praying and being faithful to this commitment of prayer.

I continually pray for all of you who have prayed for us.
God bless.

Climbing Water Towers

God has been showing me for months just exactly how he wants me to see him and how he wants me to trust in him and rely upon him for my future.

I missed this lesson for months but as I was relating a story about my son Samuel I realized that God had been speaking to me for a long time about what I would say is our future in Rwanda.

For over a year Samuel has been conjuring up ideas in his head of what he wanted to be when he was big. He first followed the same path as many boys his age and said he wanted to be a cowboy. He then graduated to being a cowboy and living on a farm with a big RV that he and daddy lived in. He wanted me to work on the farm with him when he was older. I could think of nothing more wonderful than living with my son on a farm. After a couple of months he changed his plans and decided that he wanted to be a water tower painter. He and I were to climb the towers and paint them when towns called us. We spent months listening to the loud cries of a 4 year old in the back seat each time we passed a water tower, "Daddy, we're going to paint that water tower, you and me!" Then it was on to moving to Hershey Pennsylvania, where I did my medical training, to work in the chocolate factory. He and I are going to make Hershey Kisses and candy bars.

In each plan, he has one recurring theme. It will be he and I. (english majors keep silent about that last statement) He has no concept of a future without me right there with him, helping him do whatever hard work there is to do. He is not even afraid of climbing water towers as long as I am there with him. WOW! What a picture of God.

Deuteronomy 31:6
So be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid and do not panic before them. For the LORD your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor abandon you.”

Romans 8:31
What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

I can go on and on. But my point is that just like Samuel, I know if my Father goes ahead of me and is there when I get there, I will not fail. I will be able to climb water towers. And they will be beautiful towers when we are done.