Summer of new things

This will break our recent years' pattern of using the Christmas letter to cover the full year.  Suddenly this summer, we are finding our days and weeks filling with more than the routine exercise classes at the Y.  

It started with a call from our church global missions office asking if we could be available to with a new project that, in most cases, we could do from home.  They are changing a number of the computer finance tools that the missionaries use and the staff felt that our skills could be useful as part of the support team during the transition. As we learned more of the details and plans, we agreed.  The full schedule is not clear but this certainly does not look like a short term project and we are okay with that.

Alaskan glacier

Last year was our 25th anniversary but, due to Covid's impact on travel, we had deferred our hope of visiting Alaska.  But then, once again, God stepped in and we 'randomly' learned some dear friends had just scheduled a cruise to Alaska and they were excited to have us join them.  On a very short timeline, we got booked and went on our planned-but-unplanned holiday.  It was a wonderful time and made even more special by the couple we shared it with, Clark and Connie Armstrong.

Then, at this year's Illinois District Assembly, we tragically learned of the passing of the District's Missions president the night before.  A few weeks later I (Dan) was having a text conversation with the District Superintendent about some changes on the district web site when he mentioned that he was gathering names of possible candidates to fill the missions position. I went on with the site work and then asked if he had been hinting in some way.  He responded, "Well, yes, sort of."  I responded that because I had no experience or knowledge of the district level missions organization, I was not interested.  However, that being said, I was available...  Soon he responded by asking that I prepare a bio for consideration to go with the others he was gathering. A few days later, he called to inform me that I had been elected if I would accept!  If you have been around this blog for very long, you know that we have learned that God's plans are far better than ours. So I accepted with no clue of what this meant or how I could fulfill it. What I told God that night was this is ALL ABOUT HIM!

In the meantime, Janet has been volunteering at a Nazarene church not far from ours in Belleville as their bookkeeper after theirs passed away, leaving books that needed to be reorganized and redone. She keeps busy feeding us healthy meals, some from harvesting our prolific blackberry vines, the single small apple tree that resulted in 1/2 gal of apple butter, and our vegetable garden.

So as you can see, we have new opportunities and responsibilities God has once again led us into.  HIS guidance and your prayers are all we need going on from here.