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There is a special announcement in this post! Will you read far enough to find it?

A missionary on deputation has a lot of exciting things to do. We travel to places that until recently we didn’t even know were places. We meet lots of new people. We see new perspectives on things we may have thought could only be done one way. People take us out to eat and entertain us in their homes. Probably the most exciting is that almost everywhere we go I have opportunity to teach the word of God. What a privilege!

There is also the mundane; I spend hours on the phone talking to answering machines, knowing that for every 20 messages I leave I will get one call back. I examine hundreds of church web sites trying to gauge the character of a ministry. Carol and I mail packets to many a church for which we can’t find an e-mail address. Of course we also have to maintain our home and have it ready to leave for weeks or sometimes months at a time.

We find that less and less we feel as though we belong anywhere in particular. I think this is a good thing, for I look forward to being a more permanent part of a church and work in Germany. I am beginning to think of us as “belonging” there. To be sure there is much we will miss here. Not the least of which will be our first grandchild who is to make his/her appearance this August.

Where is all of this going? Whether you are a missionary moving to a foreign land or someone who has lived in the same town all his life and expects to stay there, there is a certain feeling of longing for that permanent home. In this world it is always nice to have a place to call home and in that place we will be content to live and serve our amazing God. All the while, we remember that we are pilgrims in this world and don’t really belong here for we are citizens of a better land and look forward to that time that we are really home! To put it much more simply “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain”.

In the next three weeks we have only one meeting and a wild game dinner at our home church. Once we get into March we will be on the go for a long time. This is a good thing! Pray that the Lord will keep our car running and safe for the many miles we will travel. Also pray that we will be a help and encouragement in the churches where we present our work and that people will respond well to the teaching of the Word. Pray too that the Lord would provide means for missions minded churches to support missionaries. Also please pray for the men in Germany who are hopefully in the final stages of meeting the government’s demands for paperwork in order to receive permission to begin renovating the buildings at Camp Impact.

Yes the big announcement, for those of you who haven’t heard already from some other source, is that Mike and Melanie will soon be parents. In German that means Carol and  I will be “Oma” and “Opa”.

 

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