It is official

We are not leaving in 2.5 weeks for our Gateway training. We will be leaving in a little over 4 months, January 4th to be exact.

It has been very frustrating for me and I was hesitant to post about the whole thing because I just wanted to sit and cry. Our support is very low still and we didn't have enough for our training class. Our house has not sold yet though we have had several leads that we followed through on. But the Lord's timing is best.

After thinking this through for the past three days we have come to realize that waiting for a few more months is not a bad thing. This gives us 4 more months to speak to more churches and 4 more months to either sell or rent out our house.

We will not be going to Benin but will fly directly into Togo where the M/V Africa Mercy will be in February 2010.

So though I am sad we won't be attending our Gateway training with the new friends we met in Texas in June I am excited to see God at work in our lives as we wait on Him.

Please continue to pray for us as we seek God's will in our lives and pray that we glorify Him in our lives.

Yard Sale and Anna's Classroom

We just had a 3 day yard sale to help get rid of a lot of our 'stuff' in preparation to leaving for our training in one month! The yard sale went really well and our house is emptying out.

Anna's Kindergarten teacher on the Africa Mercy just posted pictures of Anna's classroom on her blog, click here to see them. Anna is very excited about going to school on a ship. We have completed 5 weeks of homeschooling so far this term but just took off this week because of our yard sale. We are also taking next week off for Vacation Bible School at our church.

We won't be on the ship until the end of November but it's nice to see aspects of it before we go.

Schedule Clarification

We are leaving New York on September 14th to head on down to Texas for our Gateway training which starts September 19th. We won't be on the Africa Mercy until mid November. We are planning on driving back to New York and flying out of the Rochester airport after our training is finished.

We need to sell or rent out our house before we leave for Africa so that is our biggest prayer request at this point next to raising our support.

We have found homes for both our dog and cat and are now getting ready to have a yard sale next week to get rid of a lot of our 'stuff'.

We basically have 5.5 weeks to downsize from a 1900 square foot home that we have lived in for the past 11 years into 8 duffel bags.

Presenting at church

I asked Deborah and Anna what I should write about this week in our blog and Anna told me I should write down my adoption story! I had to tell her I wasn't adopted so then she wanted to know how I got here, don't I have a story? I assured her I had a story but it wasn't as exciting as hers :-) I had completely forgotten that Deborah at age 4 had also thought everyone was adopted. What a fun age :-)

So instead of writing down my adoption story I thought I would share about today. We did our Mercy Ships presentation at church today. We showed a clip from one of the DVDs that Mercy Ships had given us to show and then Ray spoke about what we would be doing. I was standing next to him along with Deborah in case Ray choked up and could not continue but God answered my prayer and Ray did just fine. Anna chose at the last minute to not come up front with us and sat with our good friends.

We were very encouraged by the response of our church family.

I am posting a picture of our display table. The girls want to know if you thought the dolls were the girls at first glance :-) I was going to have the girls wear their African clothes but they are much too small for our growing girls and we will have to wait until we return to Africa to buy new outfits for them. So I put the clothes on their dolls.