Facing Forward

Dear Friends, Family, and Supporters,

Happy New Year!  Thank you so much for your faithful prayers and support over the past year.  You may have noticed that traveling was a theme of last year for us.  The Lord has been so gracious to meet every need, protect us on every trip, sustain us while we had to be apart, and give us these opportunities to serve fellow missionaries in other areas while our numbers of new missionaries here in our location have been low.

You might also remember that we were really looking forward to having some “together” time over the Christmas break.  We are so thankful for the good memories the Lord gave us as a family during the kids’ school break.  Beforehand DJ and I had hoped to be able to take a whole week off to spend time with the kids.  That didn’t happen, but we were able to work about half-time for two weeks of their vacation instead, which gave us time to rest and do fun activities as a family.

The kids will be headed back to school on January 9, the same day that I (Jennifer) leave for my next trip.  I plan to attend a literacy workshop and then 3 sets of back-to-back consultant meetings on our former island for two weeks, getting back “home” to DJ and the kids on January 23.  As always, we’d appreciate prayers for my travels and the intense meeting schedule (discussing some really important things that affect our language and culture learning program for our whole field) as well as for DJ and the kids as they continue with life, school, and ministry here while I’m gone.

Early last year we asked you to pray for the Lord to raise up more laborers for the harvest field here, since we were not going to receive any new language & culture study families for the whole year (pretty much an unheard of situation during the last 15 years of our field’s history.)  Well, it seems like the Lord is saying ‘yes’ to those prayers this year.  It looks like we will receive a new family and a single lady in March, 3 families in July, and several families (not sure exactly how many yet) in November.  Needless to say, we are very excited.  We also covet your prayers as we get back into the routine of a full work load here while the need for me to make trips back to our former island to help with consulting is also ongoing.  The only consultant currently serving in that region will be moving into a village to learn a new language and culture starting this year, so most of her time will be taken up with that ministry for many years to come.  Please pray that the Lord will raise up co-workers with an aptitude for consulting to join the team both here in our location and in other regions where the consulting team is short-staffed.

Thanks so much for all your prayers.  We don’t want to sound like a broken record, but it really does make all the difference that you are lifting us up before the throne of grace.