Thursday, October 26, 2017

Closing Doors

Since we left Africa March 31st and touched down in the US on April 1st, we have been on furlough.  Our furlough was meant to be a time of rest, rejuvenation, learning and education to further ourselves, meeting with our partners to tell stories about Africa and give updates, visiting with friends and family, and filling our hearts with American culture to begin our return back to African in August. But life happened - doctors appointments didn't go as planned, a pregnancy, an emergency surgery, and other setbacks. This led us to question our calling and what God was asking of us.

After much prayer, we felt God closing the door on our return to Kinshasa. This has been very hard on all of us. When we left, we did not pack up our life but came with the basics, knowing we would return home (to Kinshasa) shortly. We left our treasured items, left our friends, left our pet Tchaku, and never said good-bye. This transition has been hard, and closure will not come easy, since only Kevin returned to close out our life there recently. We will always remember Kinshasa with many fond memories.

As of today, our prayer letter is "live" online and is being mailed out to you soon (who subscribe). In it is our announcement about closing the chapter on returning to Africa. But with it is some very good news. It seems God has opened another door in our lives when we felt most discouraged. MAF has offered us a position which may be accomplished "remotely." This will allow us to stay in Tennessee and work from "home" helping all the missionaries in all the bases with a new aircraft maintenance computer program. This is so exciting for us (especially for me [Tasha] who is on bedrest right now and can still use a computer to work!).

To the right of this post you will see a link for our "Fall 2017" prayer letter with the official announcement. Please take the time to read over it. We would love for you to pray for us during this transition time. In the meantime, you will see some changes to our blog to reflect our current happenings. I would also like to finish up a lot of blogs I started while in Africa and never finished writing them. While we are no longer "international missionaries" we are still missionaries and want to share about the many ministries of MAF. I hope to continue this blog and keep all our readers informed about our lives and how God is using MAF to shine his light to the world.