Audra sat me down outside of her parents’ cabin tonight to give me a haircut. Sitting there in the north woods of Minnesota was amazing. The knoll on which we sat gave us a nice view of the world in which my in-laws live and breathe and have their being. Around us spring had come to the northlands. Chickadees, sparrows, crows, and orioles chirped, sang and croaked around us as they darted and dived for insects and other delicacies for dinner. All day the swallows were swooping around our heads mating, building nests, and preparing for a new hatch of eggs. In a tree behind us, a striped chipmunk scolded us for setting up on his knoll. A few minutes later he appeared on a woodpile just beside us to see what it was exactly we were up to. Apparently satisfied, he scurried off into a thicket of blossoming chokecherries. On the opposite side of the thicket, seventy foot Christmas trees stretched upward. Interspersed among the spruce and balsam trees the white bark of birch trees play hide-and-seek in the shadows.

Behind us and through a small forest of more birch, a meadow opens the land to new possibilities. Audra’s parents have turned this into their garden. A slight understatement due to the fact that today we hardly made a dent in planting next fall’s bounty. Todd and I put seven hundred foot rows of potatoes in the ground (five varieties). Kia and Ayliś put in three rows of pumpkins and other squash (each one about 1/8 of a mile long. In addition, they planted a hundred fifty foot row of gladiolas and another row (same length) of onion sets. With all that work, the garden is still empty. Plenty of room for corn (that should go in tomorrow), tomatoes, and everything else.

Just around the corner from the house there is another 120 acres of land owned jointly by members of the family. For the past hundred years or so, it has been cleared by farmers to grow crops and to feed their animals. The soil wasn’t quality and the crops weren’t great. The family is doing what they can to reclaim the land with woods. They’ve planted more than 6000 trees and many more shrubs and bushes. Over the past three days we have put protective covers around hundreds of them. In the coming years, these woods will be home to thousands of birds, moles, stoats, deer and bear.

Oh, yeah. One group of animals we’ve forgotten to mention: the insect family. Minnesota is known for its mosquitoes (the state bird, they joke), gnats and ticks. The first two aren’t so bad yet. We had a frost two nights ago so they are late in hatching. Darn… But the ticks are here. Over the past few days we have brushed and picked and searched for and discovered not just a few ticks. In three days I’ve found at least twenty on me. Todd and Audra have had a good number. Kia and Ayliś haven’t told me how many they’ve had. We live. We learn. We adapt. Life goes on. It’s pretty cool.

I wasn’t sure what to call this post.  As of yesterday at noon we were homeless again as we head back toward Georgia (via Audra’s family in northern Minnesota).  For the past six weeks, home has been  the Mission Training International campus in Monument/Palmer Lake, Colorado.  But our training is over and we headed east.  A few days before we left, a tornado struck north of Denver (we were way south), and the wind didn’t seem to have calmed down.  As we drove out of Denver on I-76, the wind seemed to want to blow us back.  As we fought the headwinds, we watched huge clouds of dust billowing and hiding the horizon.  A few miles down the highway, the road changed direction and the wind came from the side.  This was better for gas mileage, but sudden gusts rocked the van back and forth a bit.  When it began to rain, we turned on the wipers, but that did no good, for the crosswind was so strong, it picked up the wiper away from the window. 

Just into Nebraska we stopped at Wendy’s for our cheap dinner (we love the dollar menu).  As we ate, the winds rattled the metal on the building’s facade and soon the hail began.  Not a good sign.  Hail, it seems, likes to pelt the way for tornados.  I overheard a customer talking with one of the employees about the weather, but I didn’t hear the details.  As he was preparing to leave (at the same time we were leaving), I went over and asked him what he knew about the weather. 

“Not much,” he said, “But when I was in line for food, I asked the person in front what he did and he told me he was a storm chaser.”  Not, I repeat, a good sign. 

A quick call to friends in Georgia (thousands of miles away) who checked the weather online confirmed our fears of the weather.  A few miles down the road, we decided to call it a night. 

This morning, the wind had died down a bit and it was foggy, but we headed north into South Dakota and ended the day in Fargo, ND.  Audra and I went to school across the river in Moorhead about 20 years ago, so this was a bit like coming home, but I don’t think we know anybody here anymore…yet!

We had the pleasure of caravaning with a good from from MTI for a good part of the journey (we said our good-byes in Sioux Falls, SD).  Gabriele is a missionary heading toward Zambia to work with missionary pilots.  A great lady, she grew up a missionary kid in Alaska as her parents translated the New Testament into a first nations langauge.   We stopped a woman at the rest area to take our picture before we “waved her off.”  I’ll add a link to her blog over on the side here. 

 Be blessed in all you do. 

We start the fourth day of PILAT today. PILAT stands for Program In Language Acquisition Techniques and has been around for about thirty years (I think). What it is, is a focus on skills for learning foreign languages. Various techniques are taught that help us to look into the language using total physical response: touch the book, hand on head, finger under the pen, and so on. Then there are the phonics drills (not the title of this blog). We sit in small groups, listening to our instructor say a sound and then we repeat it. In English there are 44 distinct sounds created by various things such as tongue position, air flow, and lip shape. Because of the many combinations of these things there are literally thousands of sounds the human mouth can produce. As I said, in English we use 44 of those sounds. Other languages use all sorts of the others. If we want to learn a language, we need to be able to form those other sounds. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but it is fun.

This morning we break into new groups and work with a native speaker to apply some of the techniques we’ve learned so far. Now this is gonna’ be cool. Kia will be learning bits and pieces of Russian; Aylis’ will learn some Vietnamese; and Audra, Todd and I are in the Mandarin Chinese group. We are preparing for some delightful headaches by the time we go to lunch!

The picture is of Aylis’, Kia and Todd last Monday when we went to Focus on the Family. They had a chance to do an Adventures in Odyssey episode in a studio like the one they professional actors use. It was really neat. Kia and Aylis’ had speaking roles while Todd was the Foley (sound effects).

Be a blessing today to someone.

We had a week visiting my brother in Grand Junction, Colorado, the other side of the state.  One of the cousins is just a few months younger than Todd and the other a few weeks older than Soraya.  Visiting around Grand Junction and enjoying the high desert of western Colorado…traveling into Utah to see a canyon carved by the Colorado River (not the Grand Canyon but grand all the same)…seeing the arches at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah… It was good to catch up and to see the family. 

We’re back home now.  Home?  Where is that?  We’ve learned it is where we are as a family (I think I’ve blogged about that already).  It was strange, but as we drove back to Palmer Lake today to start the second part of our training here at Mission Training International (MTI), it felt like we were coming home.  We lived here, after all, for three weeks.  We grew to love the people we met.  The place is the same, but the faces are different, but that’s okay.  We’ll learn to love them, too…knowing it will be hard to say good-bye in two weeks…but again, that’s okay, too. 

I’ll write more later.  God bless you and Good Night.

We went ice skating today in Colorado Springs. We hadn’t gone in a long, long, looong time. When I was a kid in Montana, I remember going out on ponds and reservoirs after the winter cold had frozen them solid. In between the bumps and the snow and the cold, I remember zipping around on the ice, playing tag and crack the whip. Great memories. The kids haven’t had much of a chance to do that, though.

In Georgia, ice skating is not a big thing. That didn’t stop some of us, though, from strapping on skates and hitting the ice. Todd and I went first. I was surprised how fairly easy it was for me to remember how to put one foot in front of the other. I wasn’t spinning axels or jumping or anything special, but I was skating. This was Todd’s second time, though. He was holding on to the edge of the rink when I came around. Stopping to skate with him, we held hands as we inched his way around together. Kia joined us for this round. About halfway around the rink, a boy a few years younger than Todd skated up to us and said simply, “He’s a big kid.” Then he shook his head and said incredulously, “and he doesn’t know how to skate.”

“No,” I said, “where we live, we don’t skate much.”

He lifted his eyebrows in disbelief. “You don’t skate much?”

“No,” I said. “Where we live it hardly ever gets cold. We don’t have ice.”

Again the lifted eyebrows showed his disbelief. “You don’t have ice?”

“No, we don’t.” I don’t think he believed us as he skated off.

Kia, Todd and I smiled at one another and continued on around. After the first lap, one of the staff people at the rink gave Todd a stack of buckets he could slide along on the ice for support. It worked really well and his confidence grew. Every once in a while we’d see the boy skating around us…on one foot…backwards…turning… He wasn’t showing off. Just having fun skating.

About an hour later, he skated up to me and said simply, “This is my sixtieth time to skate.”

“Wow,” I said. And then pointing to Todd added, “It’s his second.”

Again the eyebrows. “You really don’t have ice?”

“No,” we laughed, “We really don’t.”

We’re going to have to get used to this. As we go into new cultures in Costa Rica (for language school) and then Peru, people are not going to believe us sometimes. We are going to feel clumsy and out of place as people zip around us. Some are going to laugh at us. Some are going to help us. To some we will be a source of aggravation. To others we will be a source of great humor. That’s okay. We’ll keep on smiling and keep on trying.

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Our training is over. At least the first part of it. SPLICE (the training we’ve been doing for the past three weeks) ended this morning after a worship service and singing. There were a lot of tears from everyone. We knew it would be this way. Three weeks ago we came together as strangers. As time passed, our connection with one another grew and we became a community…a family. To God be the glory.

Part of our training dealt with grief and loss. All of us are giving some things up. For me it was the concept of home. What is home? Where is home? What does home look like? I realized I miss my dog (I love my Dalmatian), the chickens, the garden, the yard work. It’s not always fun, but it made home. More important than place, though, is people. Home is made up of the people in our family: parents and children. Friends and neighbors. We are learning to make home wherever we are. That’s good, but we also grieve the (at least temporary) loss of place. Grief and loss of anything is not fun. It hurts. Deeply.

Today we are grieving the loss of the presence of friends. They are still friends. We will still be connected, but we won’t see one another face to face for a long, long time. All of us who went through the SPLICE program are going all around the world. We will be scattered across North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

The pain our parting gives us is worth it, though. Do you know why? Because the hurt tells us we care. We learned to love one another. That’s a good thing. We could choose safety and not hurt when we left. Or we could choose love…and cry. We choose love, and I pray we always will.

We miss all of you. We love all of you.

God bless you for who you are.