We were blessed by the Lord with the sale of our house in mid-March, and felt the quickness of the sale was a confirmation from the Lord of our mission plans. We downsized to about half the space of our former home in moving into half of a duplex, which we purchased. This will be easy to rent out while we are in Peru.
We were away from Montana for seven weeks this summer. First we visited our two sons who both were in California; Kevin, spending the summer working at Yosemite National Park and serving with A Christian Ministry in the Parks, and Ben, who was living at Sacramento at the time, but planning a move in September to the Los Angeles area. All of July 2008 we were at Mission Training International, north of Colorado Springs. We spent the first 3 weeks in a course on cross-cultural adaptation.The last 2 weeks we took a course on how to more quickly learn a foreign language with techniques applicable to any language. These were very valuable learning experiences from an experienced staff of former missionaries. We were energized by the opportunity to interact with other missionaries going out to 19 different countries with 19 different agencies. We are now back in Kalispell, Montana, finalizing our support raising, taking care of medical and dental visits, looking into travel plans, and deciding what to do with household goods we want to store.
As September draws to a close, we just finished serving on our final Tres Dias weekends (similar to Cursillo) for awhile. These weekends once again showed the mighty working of our Lord in individual's lives, and we were privileged to be a part of the teams. We'll greatly miss our group of close friends with whom we've ministered for the past 5 years.
If all goes well, we plan to leave for Arequipa in January 2009.
This page is maintained and updated by Sandy and Gloria Johnson