Moving Day and Film Festival

We moved last Saturday. The house is far from ready for us. The office is still without drywall, it's in the garage, but I'm waiting for my 10% off Home Depot coupon to come to get the electrical stuff, and the rest of the drywall materials to make that purchase.

We've been in the house for five nights now, and no big surprises except that last night we were sitting in the family room watching Game 1 of the World Series when a piece of the ceiling fell on the couch next to Sarah. I like to make things seem worse than they really are. Actually it was a piece of drywall mud about the size of a quarter. Apparently the flashing around our skylight is leaking, because there was a wet spot around one corner, the three and a half inches of rain that we got yesterday apparently was too much for it. The good news is that we have a home warranty, so somebody else gets to deal with that one.

Tonight we're having some students over to plan for an upcoming outreach we're doing at Johnson County in a few weeks. We're going to be putting on a film festival, and in the weeks leading up to it, we'll be advertising by approaching students on campus and showing them short films. This will prayerfully lead to spiritual discussions as well as an opportunity to invite them to the upcoming festival. Please keep this outreach in your prayers.

Time Marches On

The move is drawing ever closer. Over the weekend I ripped all the drywall out of our office, and hauled it all out to the garage. I'm hoping the drywall fairies will come and spirit it away during the night. Maybe they'll even leave a quarter.

We spent our date night last night priming trim and our bedroom door. We draw ever closer to being finished with this round of painting. It can't come fast enough if you ask me. Sarah likes it a lot more than I do, which is good.

We move this weekend. We really don't have very much furniture. It's all the little stuff that we have to get packed that's making me dread it. But I am looking forward to being in our house. It will be nice to not have the constant hum of the interstate, punctuated by the occasional train whistle. It's raining here right now, so the tires on I-35 are louder than normal.

Summer Plans

All four Campus Crusade teams in Missouri (or Kansas in our particular case) have two partnerships. One is with East Asia, which has been in place for four years. The other is with Cameroon, which was a new partnership last year.
For the past three weeks, Sarah and I have been praying about leading the Summer Project to Cameroon next summer. On Wednesday we made it official. It's a terrifying prospect leading a team of students (and hopefully staff) to a place that not only have we never been to, but is completely unlike anything we've ever experienced.
One of the things I'm most excited about is to share our experiences with those who go with us through their prayers and gifts. So many people will never have an opportunity to go to Africa for any number of reasons. One of my goals for the summer is to give our ministry partners glimpses of a part of the world we in the U.S. rarely even think about.
I confess that when we partnered with Cameroon, I found out where it is, but that's about as far as my cultural research went. Sadly, I still know very little, which why I'm thankful for the good folks at Wikipedia, who have made it very easy to find a wealth of suspect information on any given topic, including our summer destination.

Fall Getaway and more Wallpaper

Fall Getaway took place the last two weekends. We went BOTH weekends, because some of our students went each week. It was an amazing time. The KC Metro team offered full scholarships to all international students that went, and we ended up taking 29! It was an amazing weekend, and hands down the highlight was spending time with the international students from UCM. They had a blast together doing things like horseback riding, canoeing and eating s'mores, some for the first time. We had several good conversations with them answering their questions. The student leaders at UCM have seized the opportunity to follow up from the conference by turning their weekly meeting into an exploration of the Gospel for these students. We're so excited for how God is at work through this.

After two consecutive weekends at Fall Getaway with students, we took today off and spent more time working on the house. As promised, I mowed the back yard, and remowed (bagging this time) the front yard. The reward for my effort was 70 gallons of grass clippings. The lawn hadn't been mowed in a couple weeks, so that was fun. The wallpaper work continues, it's like an onion, the more we peel, the more layers we find. So far it doesn't smell as bad as an onion, though at some point we may start crying.

Wallpaper

We closed on our house on Wednesday. If I were a little more prepared I'd show before pictures. I'll come back to those. It's not a "Flip this House" sort of project. Everything's in good shape and well maintained, it's just that some rooms have been well maintained since 1987, others since the 70's. So our first official project as homeowners was to mow the front yard (I'm out of shape, so I'm saving the back yard for Monday) and to start stripping wallpaper.
Did you see the movie "Miracle"? The wallpaper in our office looks like the pants Kurt Russell wore during the gold medal game against the Russians. It was a good movie, but the pants were legendary. Why are we getting rid of the wallpaper? Sadly, it doesn't go well with the pumpkin orange mini-blinds. (With apologies for the cell phone camera pictures)

The Inaugural Post

This is the next first post of our blog. I've had many first posts. I've had several second posts. I've even had a few third posts. Let's hope we make it to four and beyond this time around. We've just updated our hosting plan on our website which means that some of the old site would no longer work, so we're in between designs right now.

This is a good opportunity to implement a blog into the site, because thanks to the good folks at Google, they've made it easier than ever to find out what someone on the other side of the world had for breakfast (off brand Honey Nut Cheerios, thanks for asking), or what color shirt they decided to wear on any given day (it's a striped blue polo, again, thanks for asking).

So anyway, in the interest of keeping this brief and not trying to recap the last several months of our life in a single post, I'll sign off with that. If you're looking for details on our ministry, or on the house we just purchased, you can look forward to more details being filled in for you in the coming days.