My time in the Home Office kitchen
Head of the kitchen is fun and enjoyable but also a stressful title to hold.
Sound quality
During my training to run the sound board at church here, the philosophy was “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” “This isn’t important,” he would say, and then adjust the setting that had just be deemed unimportant. Compare this with another man I met who practiced another philosophy. “This pen still has ink,” […]
New places, new faces
When I (Ely) was overseas during the summer Independence Day was difficult because I am so used to it being a big event and its not a holiday celebrated on July 4th in other places. Christmas is a similar situation for James. His family goes all out making it a special time; they sent us […]
God provided a place
I lived eight months at the training center and it never quite felt like home. For the first few months in Wisconsin, I felt even more out of place. Now, God has provided a little townhouse for Ely and I to live in for the first few months of marriage before we move to our […]
God creates unity
When Ely and I were dating long distance, one way we decided to make Christmas special was to open advent calendars each day over the phone. I found a cheap chocolate one, and she came up empty at a couple of stores. I promised that I’d get her an advent calendar some other time, and […]
How many Bibles do you have?
The Bible is the worlds all-time best selling book, with billions of copies in print. It’s a hard statistic to track, since there are so many versions, languages, and publishers, but one statistic that I found estimated around 5 billion have been printed. Since the world population is 7.5 billion, and I can count 8 […]
Supporting a missionary explainer video
I made a little video to remind people that when you write a check, it should be made out to Ethnos360 with a note saying who its for. Check it out on Youtube:
The right to pursue happiness
Our last class before I graduated from the training center was called Suffering. The purpose of the class was not to make us suffer (other classes fill that requirement) or even to mentally prepare us for suffering since “No matter how much we are mentally prepared, the cold water will always take our breath away.” […]
Phonetics
We’ve almost completed the first phonetics class where we learn to distinguish and repeat various sounds that may occur in a language. In general, we start with the most familiar sounds in a group that we use in English and add the sounds that either don’t exist in English or exist but we don’t think […]
Mail delivery
There’s a letter for me! An unknown student of a Christian school in the United States reminded me of how encouraging a little bit of communication can be. Speaking of which, it has been one of my goals to send postcards to my supporters. I’ve picked out a handful that don’t seem completely tourist-y, and […]