Here’s a quick update on the rest of our summer plans…our finances and future plans.
Summer: New Heights Church has been awesome and provided us with a house in Fayetteville for the summer, which we moved into on Monday! Thanks for the help arranging everything, Karen and Ruth! We’ll be in Fayetteville until early August. Then we plan to make a trip up to Wisconsin before school starts back up to see all you Brooklifers again! We’re working on raising monthly support for most of the summer…but more on that a bit later.
Future: We’ve officially chosen to go to Papua New Guinea for career tribal church planting! Our timeline for getting there looks something like this:
This fall: We finish our last semester of the church-planting track of classes at the Missionary Training Center in Missouri. Spring 2013: Because Lael received a perfect score on the linguistic aptitude test, she will be taking a semester of extra linguistics classes that will help her create the alphabet from scratch for the people we will be working with in the future. It looks like I will be coming on staff in the Mobilization Division at the MTC during this time. Summer 2013: hanging out with all our wonderful friends and family and raising support. Fall 2013: Lael and I will move to a Cherokee Native American reservation with the other linguistics students. Lael will spend six weeks working on creating her own Cherokee Alphabet with the help of Cherokee language helpers. Then we’ll come back to Missouri where she will do an 80-page write-up on her findings. 2014: We hope to be on a plane to PNG in February!
Finances: The good news: Many of you might remember a blog post from this time last year where we talked about wanting to get up to our recommended monthly budget for our time in Missouri. Well, we’ve reached that goal, thanks to the sacrificial giving of many of you! Thank you all so much for being faithful and for taking part in reaching tribal people with the gospel! I never get tired of saying it, because it’s true. God designed the church to work together, and we literally couldn’t do this incredible task without you guys! Guess what? We wouldn’t want to!
The challenging news: I say challenging because even though God has always provided for us, sometimes it’s still challenging to remember that he’s in control. Because of it’s sheer remoteness, Papua New Guinea is the most expensive field in which New Tribes works. The recommended level for our family of 4 is about $8,000/mo. This amount includes things like budgeting for future home assignments (roundtrip airfare for the four of us will be around $10,000), retirement, missionary health insurance and emergency evacuation insurance, government documents, taxes, food and supplies. Because all of our supplies will have to be flown into our tribal location, many mundane items become expensive. For instance, a package of toilet paper can cost $64.00.
We are currently at 30% of this recommended level, and we’ll be gradually raising rest between now and February 2014. Thanks again for all your prayers and sacrificial giving!
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