Furlough is Finished!

It is hard to believe that our first furlough is now over! On Tuesday at 4:40 (EST) we will be leaving Chicago for the 16 hour flight to Addis Ababa where we will arrive on Wednesday night at 9 pm Ethiopia time (2 pm EST). So, let me give you a quick rundown of our furlugh adventures. And imagine with me that I am speaking as fast as the awesome guy that did the Micro Machine comercials back in the 80's. Our furlough went something like this...
We drove over 17000 miles, drove through 17 States, ate at Chick-fil-a 21 times and 21 times Jackson asked to play first and eat later. We visited 25 churches, several of which we visted for the very first time. We toured the River Walk in San Antonio, the Alamo (which was much smaller than I thought it would be), we went to Lego Land in Florida, the Creation Museum in Kentucky, a children's museum in Illinois, a petting zoo in Texas, saw the Oscar Meyer weinermobile in Illinois.  We spent countless precious hours with family and friends laughing and just enjoying the time we could be with them, and we shared what our God is doing in Ethiopia through buidling up His church and bringing glory to His name!
And now it is finshed and we are excited to get back to Ethiopia. As you can see with the picture above, we have quite a few totes to take back! In fact, we have 21 totes, 1 suitcase and 1 tent along with a car seat. Please pray everything (and everyone) gets there safe and sound!
We have 12 bags sponsored which means we are five short of our goal. If you would like to help sponsor a bag or help with the hundered of dollars spent on minsitry items, your consideration is greatly appreciated!
Thank you for your prayers on our behalf, we look forward to getting back and unpacking and seeing what is in store!

They have arrived!

Thank you so much for praying! ALL of our documents arrived today from Ethiopia and we have them in our hands!  We board the plane in 5 days for our return...let the countdown begin :)

Urgent Prayer Need

Amanda and I have a BIG prayer request that we would ask you to pray for...our work permit and residency cards (which allow us to stay in Ethiopia legally) are currently on their way via snail mail from Addis Ababa to the US.  We MUST have these work permits and residency cards in hand to be allowed to enter Ethiopia.  Our flight leaves next Tuesday, June 26, from Chicago and it is imperative that we have these cards in our possession before we board that plane.  Will you please join us in praying that these necessary documents will arrive quickly and securely? Otherwise, we cannot leave the US without them.  If for some reason, the documents do not arrive in this time frame, this will be very detrimental to the renewal of our work permit and residencies.  It's in situations like this that I am so thankful that we serve a God who is caught off guard by nothing! 

Simply trusting, my friends, simply trusting!

We will keep you posted...

Furlough Update

Two weeks from now, we will, hopefully, be sound asleep in Ethiopia :) We are now in Illinois with just under two weeks before we leave. We have two more churches this weekend to visit and then next week we will be focusing on packing up our suitcases It has been a great time, of which I will talk about a bit in our next post. We are pleased to say that we have had a few more bags sponsored for our return trip. Special thanks to Stonebridge Baptist Church in San Antonio, the Rackley family in Raleigh NC, two ladies at West Fayetteville Baptist Church in Fayetteville NC, the Laminack family in Fort Worth TX, the Estes family in Forth Worth TX and the Spivey family in Raleigh NC. We now have 9 1/2 bags paid for! We are not sure how many bags we will have, we already have 9 packed with several items to go. We are hoping anywhere between 16-20 bags. If you interested in sponsoring a suitcase, please feel free to email us for more information.