Perspective

I made my daughter cry on Thanksgiving. The permanence of our planned stay in Thailand became clear to her during our evening phone call. It made me sad to upset Amanda so much.

This was still on my mind Friday after I got the turkey cooking in Jennifer’s oven for our Thanksgiving dinner. It was a beautiful day so my husband suggested I take my run for the day. (Yes, he does make good suggestions sometimes) I decided to take an opposite route from the way I usually go from Jennifer’s and headed up to the left in conversation with God. Running along one straight, flat street I was praying about Amanda’s tears at our leaving and asking if we are really doing what He wants. Then I turned a corner to see the blue expanse of the sound under a blue sky with puffy clouds.
(Notice how the road disappears right after the white van)

I had never seen this view before, though I have run on that road several times. The view is at the top of a kind of hill I, as a runner, haven't learned to be thankful for yet. I still think of it as

tough to get through, or over. I rarely look back when I run, so I would always have remembered the hardness of that road rather than the beautiful view if I hadn’t gone that other way.

God used this to speak to my heart about His perspective on this coming sadness. Yes, this Leaving Time is hard, but He can see beauty in it from His viewpoint. Zech’s comment about “God is good” in their blog came back to me (reallifeontheedge.blogspot.com). He reminded me that God is good, all the time and everything He does is good, whether it seems that way to us or not. There is still the question of whether we are doing what God wants, but I see God leading us to Thailand as much as I have understood His leading at any other time in my life. That beautiful view at the right moment gave me reassurance and hope that His Good will come through this time of tears.

Two Presentations

We did two presentations this week! One was at Three Rivers Christian school and the other at East Kelso Baptist Church. It meant most of time I was home this week I was working on Power Point or our script. We are thankful that they both were well received.

Thursday afternoon, the children at Three Rivers listened and watched well.

They gave a big “Awww” at the picture of the baby panda in the Chiangmai zoo. They counted well with me in Thai, and, when we asked for questions near the end, most of their hands went up. They asked good questions too. We told them they could help in our sowing the work efforts by communicating and sharing events between their school and the schools in Chiangmai. The students and teachers showed some enthusiasm for doing this. I hope we can keep some interest up for that during our four months of language training.

Sunday morning we visited the church our daughter, Amanda, has had so much involvement with, East Kelso Baptist Church. Ken and Karen and their family go there also. We really appreciate their focus on prayer. After our presentation, their prayer coordinator came to me to finish writing down all the prayer requests we gave in our talk. She also wanted to make sure we had her email address so we can send our prayer letters to her for resending to the congregation. We thank God for putting this connection together for us so we might have this prayer support behind us.

Building update

Another potential tenant contacted us about our empty space after the sprinkler decision came down. A small, new, local winery was interested in putting in a wine tasting room to sell their wine and related paraphernalia. The restaurant owner then planned on selling her current bar set up to them. She would sell drinks still, but serve them out of the kitchen.

They also worked out a sharing of the utility costs since the restaurant owner has now taken over paying those. Then Gary checked with the City. They required us to pay an architect $300 and then determined that we must build a firewall completely around the space before they will give us permission to rent it to the winery. Gary estimates the cost for this would be thousands of dollars, well above the return we could get from the rental of the space. So, it appears the area must remain office space. God has a different plan.

Our web site

Most of you know we now have a web site! It is 2sowers.com. Gary is very thankful that Ken, one of our house sitters, has set it up for us. Gary did not want to try to keep up a web site. It is still in the beginning stages, though. We are finding out it involves our time just to get things to Ken to put on it. There are several sections we are slowly getting filled in.

This blog will be on the web site too. Ken said we can use the topic section to put in our prayer requests. That way people looking for our prayer requests will be able to click on that section and see all the prayer requests that we have made over a period of time. We will also be able to put answers in under an answered prayer section. I will be trying to get our prayer requests, and answers, in there soon.

:J