Yikes!

Hard to believe but two weeks from today we'll have already been on the road to Mazatlan for a couple of days! Time has really flown by but we have managed to get everything checked off our "to do" list that we needed to get done. Stuff is packed, people are set to come get the last of the furniture, and the truck has had its 60,000-mile check up. Retirement and deferred comp accounts are ready to roll, wills are done, address changes made and utilities all set to be shut off!

We have some dinners out with friends and family, goodbye parties at our jobs, a last meeting with our small group from church, farewell service at church, good-byes to everyone here and those we'll see along the road too. We hope to have lunch or dinner with James and Paula in Mesa and meeting Pastor Ted and Karla, we will even try to make Gola's 90th birthday in Nogales...not sure if we can make that one or not, but we'll try.

Can't wait to meet Darwin and Mary Ann and Gracie who are already serving in Mazatlan! We are looking forward to meeting our host family and to language and culture learning from them. We are excited to get settled into our new location and set up house in the coming weeks. We also can't wait for Tom and Lidia and Cristina and Gracia to arrive in Mazatlan...it will be good to see them again! And a planned WMPL reunion to include our fellow briefing course grads Nate and Amy Lindquist!

Plus friends Arlie and Pat and Richard and Ginny will all be visiting Mazatlan in January and we hope to be able to visit with them there.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!!

Praise report

Thanks to all of you for praying for the work that needed to be done on the house after the buyer’s inspection! All the work is now complete and we are proceeding to closing! Praise God!

Last Sunday Greg and family came down for dinner and while they were here he did the corrections to the breaker box that needed to be done. Handy to have a kid who is a licensed journeyman electrician! Another praise!

Then yesterday, we had a whirlwind of activity at the house, starting at 8 am with the arrival of the chimney guy. The buyer’s inspection had indicated the fireplace damper wasn’t closing properly. But after a thorough inspection and testing the chimney expert declared it to be in perfect working order! Another praise!

At 9, the contractor came to inspect the master bath floor as they buyers inspector had detected moisture in the toilet area. Full inspection revealed the wax seal had begun to fail, there was a recent, tiny leak, no damage to the floor at all and just the wax ring replaced! Another praise!

The appraiser arrived a little after 10, a great Christian guy! We chatted about the house and the mission while he did his inspection and measurements and then he was off, freeing us to do a little shopping before our Thrivent guy arrived to finalize everything before the move. Another praise!

Then at 3 the furnace guy arrived to do a full inspection, and the furnace passed with flying colors, the concern about “water” noises by the selling agent are just normal noises for a super high efficiency furnace such as ours. Another praise!

We then proceeded to pick up our sister-in-law from work and transport her to her car, which was being repaired in Lacey, 10 miles north of us. Then off to more shopping and we closed out the day praising God and celebrating with a dinner out at our favorite Mexican restaurant.

We serve and awesome and wonderful God. He is so good and we are so thankful!

Twelve days…

I am a short timer now, only twelve working days left for me!

And what an interesting day I had at work today…I found I’d been deleted out of the system and was no longer employed! Seems a tiny typo obliterated nearly an entire year of my career and it took all day to get it fixed. My boss entered my termination date as January 23, 2006, but somehow on the way through the chain of command to human resources it got changed to 2005. Oooops. In a heartbeat all my connection with my agency was gone, all my leave was wiped out and I wouldn’t have been able to use my key card in the morning to get into the building. Since I’m the only one who starts at 7…it would have been a chilly wait for my first co-worker to arrive! Everyone thought I took it all very well, and in the scheme of things this was nothing, a blip, a hiccup.

Considering eternity, we are all short timers here on earth. Our entire lives are just a tiny blip, a mere hiccup in the great expanse of time. But what we do while we are here DOES matter in the scheme of things! God has a plan for each of us and we have a finite amount of time to do the job He’s set before us. He wants all people, all nations to come to know Him and worship him. It’s our job to make Him known, to share our amazing, loving Father with everyone, whether that’s across the world or across the fence. That’s way more than a blip! It’s a giant tidal wave of joy that changes the world in a positive, wonderful way one person at a time. Time is short, better get busy!!

Our house is sold and we’ve given notice on our jobs!

Praise God, we have a signed deal on our house and we are thankful! The inspection was last Wednesday, and the buyers came back with a list of eight things they wanted us to agree to do, and our realtor advised that we should offer to do four of them, so that’s what we did. He called us today to say the buyers had signed off on the four items and that we’ll now proceed to closing! We are excited that this went so smoothly and KNOW that it was because of your prayer coverage during the process.

We also gave notice on our jobs today, official notice anyway, they’ve known for weeks that we were leaving. It was a little more emotional than I expected it to be…

In about a month we’ll be on the road to Mazatlan. We still don’t have a family to stay with, so please keep that in prayer. We’d like to stay with someone for a month or so to begin learning language and culture, and we’ve been praying about a couple from the downtown Mazatlan church who are considering hosting us, but haven’t heard what their decision is yet.

Thanks so much for your prayers and support as we prepare to leave for Mexico!

Our first snow!

Winter is trying to get a jump start here…we woke up this morning with one or two inches of very wet snow! You folks in the east and Midwest will laugh, but our schools started two hours late in Olympia, and many school districts in the surrounding communities actually closed because of the snow! Here’s a photo I took of our pond while I was out feeding the squirrels and blue jays:



Our pond in our first snow of the season.