the air out here

Greetings from beautiful Spokane, Washington! I am waiting with my sister, Dorothy, for our sister, Kiki, to arrive from Japan.  My flight finally arrived just before 1:00 a.m. local time which is 4:00 a.m. Ohio time!  What a day/night!  The good news is that we have a week with Kiki, and we will have our final, "Good-bye" to our parents.  Amid all the chaos of packing the house and transferring our lives to Sierra Leone having this time to reminisce with them about Mother and Daddy will be so good.  

So, I will be in and out of connectivity, mostly out.  Randy will be in Indiana with his family for Juanita's birthday on Tuesday, and he hopes to get some of the farm equipment palletized for shipping.  Katey is in the bush in Mozambique and needs your prayers for her visa to get resolved by July 26th.

We have gotten information about a very good ticket at a very good price to Sierra Leone on August 21st.  Here's praying it happens!

too much stuff!

Today I am taking an unpaid day off work to make progress on the packing front.  I have finally begun to say what Randy has said for months now, "We have too much stuff!"

This is an extremely American phenomenon... no where else in the world is there so much stuff available and so much of the "pack-rat" lifestyle.

So the words of Jesus, "Do not store up your treasure where moth and rust destroy, or thieves break in and steal..." keep going through my mind.  The rest of the world does not have the problem of too much stuff like so many of us here in the West, the majority of the world struggles to have enough to survive.  So I hope to live more simply, and do with a lot less, and be more grateful.  In a real sense it is easier to be thankful when there is less.