Often there are certain truths we know about the Lord in our head. We’ve learned about His faithfulness and His sufficiency and can give a textbook answer for what the Lord is like and what He’s done for us. But the times when the Lord allows us to wade through challenges in our lives give us a deeper and fuller understanding of His grace. Over the years we have seen so many examples of the Lord’s faithfulness and, for our family, we have experienced that again these past 10 months.
Since our teammates Benjamin and Missy Hatton left Amdu early last May for their home assignment in the US, we have been the only missionary family here in the tribe. In our plan, this wasn’t supposed to happen. With three families typically on a church planting team, one family on furlough would still leave two families working together in the tribe. But the Lord in His wisdom and plan knew the Parry family would have to leave our team for medical reasons. This stretch in here “alone” has been a great time of having to depend on the Lord and be trained by Him. We have learned so much, grown as a family and deepened relationships with our Amdu friends. While most people feel sorry for us, we would not trade away this time! Through the encouraging days as well as the hard, lonely, frustrating and overwhelming days, the Lord has graciously given us His strength, wisdom, presence and loving care in abundance. We praise Him!
In less than two weeks we will be flying to town (on the new Kodiak!) for our annual regional conference with our fellow NTM missionaries. We are feeling kind of weary and are ready for the fellowship and encouragement that Conference always brings. We are also very much looking forward to seeing our teammates as they return from the US. Following the conference, both of our families will fly back to Amdu and once again continue learning the Amdu language and culture. We are all in the final level of formal language study. Next on the horizon for our team is finalizing literacy materials and preparing to teach our Amdu friends to read and write their own language.
Thank you to so many of you who have been an encouragement to our family! Many of you write to us, send care packages and let us know that you are praying faithfully for us. We appreciate you very much. Please keep praying!
We often have trouble including pictures over our slow high frequency radio modem that we have here in the tribe for sending and receiving email. So, until we get out to town and can update some photos, you can go to the “About” tab and click on the Family link to see photos of our family.