At long last, our shipment has arrived. We shipped 18 boxes (roughly 100 cubic feet) from our house in Indy here. It’s taken well over two months, but it arrived. I must admit there were numerous times I suspected someone had simply absconded with our valuables. What are we most excited about? Warm clothes for a starters. We had only packed autumn clothes, but we’ve been getting some winter weather so we were sweating it a little (and our sweat was freezing into icy droplets). For another, our good computer was in one of those boxes – which is a huge relief for work. Our little laptop could just hardly keep up. There were also some musical instruments, a sewing machine, and LOTS of books.
Here are some happy, happy pictures:
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Ange does a celebratory cheer.
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My preciousssss…
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Boxes and boxes and boxes.
Tonight is the last night we’ll sleep in Indianapolis for a long time. Tomorrow we move out of our cozy room at the Woodruff House and drive to Kokomo to spend a few days with Ange’s parents. This is so exciting…
Well…exciting and sad…
Exciting, sad, and fun…
Ok, exciting, sad, fun, and bittersweet…
Exciting, sad, … well you get the idea.
We received an e-mail today letting us know that our visa has been granted. There are no more major obstacles to our move, so we plan to leave in early September. Our visa starts September 1 and lasts for a year, after which we’ll have to reapply.
I can’t tell you how happy (and sad) we are. It’s been a long road, and it looks like we’re finally about to turn the corner. Thank you for your prayers.
Mark and Ange
If you’re anything like me (and I know a lot of you are…), there are many people that you intend to keep in touch with. For a while you do pretty well, but then it begins to falter and after a while, there’s so much to communicate, that it becomes overwhelming and so that relationship is neglected, not because there is nothing to say, but precisely because there is too much. Well, that’s how our blog has been of late – plenty of thoughts and events, and not enough unction to function. So here are a few of the major things that have happened, which will hopefully break open a new era of blogging frequency.
First, we have moved (No, sadly, not to Northern Ireland, yet). On April 1st, a room came open in a house owned by one of our friends from church. We decided to go ahead and sell/pitch/store most of our stuff and move there so that when our visa comes through, we will have a much easier time leaving the country. A lot of the hard work of moving will be done already, and we don’t have a lease here. This new situation also allows us to cut our living expenses in half, which is great. We’ll post pictures and more info soon.
Second, we’re really excited to report that there are two other couples that are very seriously considering coming to Ireland with us. I’m not going to say any more, because we want to respect their process of discernment, but it makes us really excited to think of having companions in this journey. We’ve never been too happy about “parachute-dropping,” and have been praying for a team from day one. Please pray with us about this and pray that God would speak clearly and make a way for those He wants to join us.
So, we haven’t left yet, if you haven’t figured that out. We are still committed and, Lord willing, it will be soon.
This is really wild. We’re finally starting to go through our stuff and decide what we’re going to throw out, store, and ship. It’s easy to talk about not being attached to things until you have to put “things” in one of those three categories.
Our once-inviting, warm, friendly home is quickly becoming unfriendly:
