thanksgiving
we certainly have plenty to be thankful for this year, and we had a great time celebrating the holiday with our families! On Thursday we had a huge feast with Jessica's folks and on Friday Seth's folks were in town, too, so we had a houseful of people over to celebrate with us at our house! We also got our new furniture (see post from Nov. 22) set up in the house just in time, thanks to some helpful Craigs!
one-way tickets
yesterday we bought three one-way tickets to Ireland! We're leaving late on January 20th from DC and arriving in Cork, Ireland on the 21st. We got the tickets for an amazingly low price ($650 for all three of us!), then discovered that part of the reason for that may be that January 20th is inauguration day! Does it strike anyone else as ironic that we're leaving the country on inauguration day for a four-year term in Ireland? I promise we did not plan this based on any political views!
CrossWorld move
after months of consideration, the CrossWorld Board of Directors has decided to relocate the mission's headquarters to Kansas City, MO. The move should be completed by early 2010. Why?
1) CrossWorld will share a campus with another like-minded mission board, Avant Ministries. Although both missions will retain their unique identities, there will be some shared services such as information technology and finance - which will dramatically cut overhead costs for both mission agencies.
2) The shared campus will have more space for growth than the current CrossWorld campus. It will also have the facilities to host large groups (for training, conferences, etc) easily. CrossWorld will build a new office building, but will share the training facilities and guesthouse services with Avant. Here's a view of the campus from Google Maps:
1) we are going to ship a container over to Ireland anyway. 2) we don't have enough stuff to fill a container. 3) some furniture items are much less expensive here than in Ireland. 4) we have a discount warehouse near us.
for all of these reasons, we bought a couch, a futon frame and a kitchen table/chairs. It's all beautiful and we paid less than $900! The couch even has recliners in it and the table extends... hooray!
towards a ticket
we're working with CrossWorld right now towards getting a definite date for departure. CrossWorld has connections with airlines that we don't, so they can often get a better deal than we would be able to on our own. Right now we are looking at sometime in mid-January, between the 14th-19th.
milestone
the biggest news first: we're over 90% supported! That means that we'll be buying our plane tickets for Ireland soon - we'll let you know when we have the date nailed down!
we had a wonderful final week of training at CrossWorld headquarters. The other folks who were at training with us were people who started their journey with CrossWorld the same time we did at Candidate Orientation over two years ago! It was great to see them again!
the training itself was very helpful - we got tons of practical information about ministry, finances, and moving into another culture. We are so thankful to be part of a mission organization that works so hard to make sure we have everything we need to be ready to go and be effective in cross-culturally ministry!
tea and philly
Jessica put together a tea party for all the ladies (any age) at church last Saturday. She had lots of help from the youth group girls and a few other ladies. Basically, the youth girls put on a great party for all the other ladies at church - plus they made the older ladies verse cards to encourage them and the older ladies gave the younger girls encouraging notes as well. The idea was to try to put into practice the principles of Titus 2 concerning the relationship between older and younger women in the church. It was a blast!
In other news, we're in Philadelphia right now for our last week of missionary training. it's been great so far, and we really enjoyed being able to take the train up instead of strapping Daniel in a carseat all day!
there are pictures of the tea party and the train ride under the pictures tab.
so close
yesterday we hit 88% committed regular support! Thank you to our new partners! We're praying that God would bring us to 90% soon so that we can set a departure date. We're so close!
In this videoblog: Seth talks about our weekend, featuring a missions conference at one church and a presentation of our vision at another. He also mentions that we are within a couple hundred dollars a month of being able to set a departure date and buy our one-way plane tickets to Ireland.
churches
today and tomorrow we're going to be part of a missions conference at a church in Roanoke, and tomorrow night we'll be speaking at the evening service at a church in Buena Vista, VA. Pray for us!
