The conference was a success!

Thanks so much for your prayers for our conference last weekend. We had a lot on the agenda and were able to get through it all and have time to share devotions, worship, pray and have communion too. We even had two meals together! Even while Lidia was sick all weekend. God is good, she endured and is doing better.

Taking a break:

We did all the normal business type stuff…how to deal with the archives, scheduling vacations for this year, reviewing and approving all the treasurer’s reports, tweaked the by-laws. We also elected new officers for the coming year: Darwin will continue as Field Director, with Tom as Vice-Director, Mary Ann as Treasurer and Lidia as Secretary (with a promise from me to be her backup!). Each family gave a work report for the past year and each person gave a personal testimony.

The biggest news/change is in work assignments for the coming year. The Jackson’s will be on furlough part of the year, much of it in Washington State. When they return in the fall they will be living in Nogales and working along side the churches in the state of Sonora, training the existing pastors and looking toward an additional church plant there. The Lumppios will continue here in La Cruz, concentrating their efforts on the church, town and camp at Ceuta with Tom continuing his language study. We will be moving to Mazatlan to continue our language and culture learning and will also volunteer at some of the local orphanages as well as participating in the church in Mazatlan as opportunities arise. Yep, you read that right, we are on the move again.

You know that we have been praying about why God had us here, particularly since last October. You have been praying along with us!!! You all know we were frustrated. But, we should have known that God is faithful, He does have a plan, and that plan is being revealed to us now. We are so thankful that we serve such an awesome, patient God. This is such an answer to prayer for us!! The orphanage thing had been on our hearts for a long time, but it is definitely outside the box for WMPL and the church here. God worked all of that out in His time. Golly, that hushing up and waiting and listening thing seems to have worked pretty well.

Know that this change was no small thing…it required approval by our office in Minneapolis, the church here in Mexico and all of our team members. The first hint we had about the changes God had wrought was when our Personnel guy arrived a couple of weeks back and let us know that HQ had been praying about this since last fall same as us and they were now ready to talk to us, the church and our team about it! We were so blown away! After much prayer all we can say is Praise the Lord and wow!

So, since we had planned to stay over in Mazatlan after the conference to visit with our neighbors from Olympia, Ted and Mary Louise and with Jan, retired WMPL missionary after 35 years in Mazatlan who are visiting now, when our team gave their final approval this past weekend we decided to try to house hunt a bit too. I’ll write more on that later, but we just had to say thank you so much for your prayers!! You are such a blessing to us.