Under Construction: May 2016

I wouldn't believe it all if I hadn't just lived through it. The last two months have been a whirlwind. The Lord sold our home in a blink of an eye. We listed our home FSBO on March 13th and closed with no realtor on either side on April 15th. Now come on. Only the Lord can do things like that!

all in one months time....

2 garage sales
7 day trip to Vail for Partnership Development
5 trips to Goodwill
6 pizza orders, many more frozen dinners
2 sleepovers
1 tooth pulled
3 days in Partnership Development Training
36 hour road-trip to TX to drop off dog with dad
2 trips to Eagle, CO to store what we are keeping
20 math lessons
3 trips to Littleton to store our 15 tubs headed for Uganda
birthday party for all three kiddos
40th and 47th birthday celebration
sent the "leftover stuff" to Grand Lake for mom's attic space
Jim finished 5 projects, and closed up shop!

Needless to say, our heads were spinning and the kids spent WAAAYY too much time on their iPads last month. So when we landed at Mission Training International (MTI), we were exhausted. HOWEVER, what a wonderful respite just the first week has been! MTI is absolutely amazing and continues to blow our minds every day. The stories and life experiences from the staff cause our jaws to drop every day! The other missionaries studying with us are from all over, going all over! It is brilliant!

Allison, Julia and Bradley are having a blast. They are quick to rise and head down to the kids program for a full day of their cultural curriculum and language program. They have each already made such wonderful friends, headed to Japan, Russia, Jordan, Turkey, Guatemala, Swaziland, India, and Albania (just to name a few).

We are spending the first two weeks, primarily on a language acquisition program called PILAT. It in itself is blowing my mind. We are speaking Russian, Hindi, and Jah (a tribal language in Vietnam). Before we started, I couldn't understand the benefit from learning these languages (with us headed to a primarily English speaking country - with Lugandan being the largest tribal language in the Kampala area), but now realize the technique is really the key. We are learning HOW to be a language learner, not so much what the language is/or isn't. I'm so bummed our public school system waisted two good years on me/my education as a Junior and Senior in high school. They were trying to teach me Spanish by spoon feeding me vocabulary words and showing me how to conjugate verbs...oh so wrong! It obviously didn't work.

All said, we love it! What a privilege it is to even be here. The Lord is opening my mind and heart to a much larger canvas to paint his Glory and Gospel. Oh He is soooo good.

A few pics of the last month....

Our 15 (might turn out to be 18) tubs headed to Uganda