Big Changes

Over the past 7 months we have often asked you to pray for Galilee’s health to improve. In the last 5 days we have been coming to grips again with the reality that sometimes God answers our prayers in different ways than what we were hoping for. He is so good, and His plans are always better than ours. Galilee has been on Topamax for her migraines for over a month now, and while it seemed to be helping for a couple weeks, her migraines have now returned as strong as before. Through praying, talking as a family, and receiving outside input, it has become clear to us that we’ve tried everything we can to help her on this side of the world. So with grieving hearts we have made the decision to relocate back to the States 2 years sooner than we were planning. Lord willing, we will be planning to arrive back in Texas in early August. We appreciate your prayers as we have so very many things to work out between now and then.

We want everyone to understand that we are planning to continue in fulltime ministry with our mission organization, just from a different location and with new roles but still working to support church planting among unreached people groups.  There are still a lot of details to work out about that as well, but at this point it looks like DJ will take an off-site role managing network administration for some of our organization’s missionary training and church planting ministries.  We will continue to live by faith and rely on support from churches and individuals sent through Ethnos360 just as before.  We need your prayers & support now more than ever, and we appreciate each of you more than we can say. 

During the last week of May and first couple weeks of June, I (Jennifer) and our coworker Keri did make that consultant trip that we asked y’all to pray about last time.  We were able to visit 3 different ministry locations and lead or assist with 10 different evaluations for people studying 3 different languages.  It was an intense trip but profitable and encouraging.  A week after getting back from that, I accompanied one of our language students from here to the capital city for 5 days for her to have knee surgery.  I went along to be her translator and advocate.  Trying to get a wheelchair and navigate the extreme distances in the airport for the trip home was a nightmare, but other than that the trip & surgery seemed to go well.  Please pray for our friend’s recovery.  She is a mom of 3 young kids and trying to continue learning language and culture while she recovers.

On top of everything else, our country has seen a massive surge of Covid cases and deaths recently and our city is currently on semi-lockdown status.  So that adds another layer of challenges as we try to understand and fulfill some new requirements in order to be allowed to travel internationally a month from now.  We also have some dear national friends here that we very much want to be able to say goodbye to in person.  Please pray! 

Please feel free to message us with any questions you have.  Thank y’all so much for praying!