Prayers, Updates, & Answers

Please pray for us.  We’re not doubting our calling or facing disease.  Debts aren’t piling up and collectors aren’t after us.  The kids are fine and enjoying summer.  Karen’s even at sleep-away camp.

But we’re swamped.  We’re in a hectic season that’s very stressful.  There are more tasks to do than we can possibly accomplish in and through ourselves.  In just twelve days, we have to be out of the house that we bought when we thought God wanted us here forever.  The house just across the creek from where I grew up.  The house that had room for a workshop so I could be the kind of Dad who made things for his kids.  The house I saw while walking late one night twenty-some years ago and thought, “what a neat old house,” and that I saw five years ago and noticed was for sale.  The house with stately old trees and a pool, just like I always wanted.

The house that got full of things and that now needs to be emptied.

For weeks, we’ve been sorting everything we own into five categories:  a small amount of things to put into long-term storage here, things we’ll take with us to South Africa, things we’ll need in the temporary home we’ll have until we leave, things we need to sell, and things to just purge.  This last category has filled the 96-gallon recycling and garbage toters almost every week; my old school papers did it twice.

It’s hard.  The books I’ve loved and the ones I’ve never gotten to.  The ornately carved piano my parents restored, a piece I’ve always loved and kept and had hoped to pass down as an heirloom…  The beds I made for the kids… too big to store in our 6×12 cargo trailer.  There are stories to tell here but not the time for them now.  I want to tell them but have to get back to other tasks of sorting, purging and packing.

So I’m asking for prayer.  I’m asking you to join me in consciously connecting with God, in thanking Him for his blessings and guidance and asking for his strength and wisdom and encouragement.  I’m asking you to intercede with Him on our behalf.  He taught us He would always listen and He does, especially when we ask Him together, and we have faith that He does and will.

“Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.”

James 5:14-15, New American Standard Bible