VISA's Recieved!!

We learned just the day before Thanksgiving that our VISA's had been approved for the Philippines! We were suppose to only be approved for a 3 month visa, but as God would have it – we were approved for a 1 year visa! When we told the Philippine branch office this, their response was "you are blessed – this has only happened to a very few people (to get approved for a year right off the bat). God is so faithful!!!

Thanksgiving

We pray your Thanksgiving Day was filled with special blessings. We were anticipating early on that we would be having Thanksgiving with some of our family members but never dreamed God would bless us as He did on this day. The weeks leading up to Thanksgiving became unsettling for us as we learned that our daughter would not be able to make the trip from Rochester to Dallas to spend Thanksgiving with us. Our hearts were heavy with the thought of not having her with us.

We continued in prayer that God would bring whomever He wanted us to spend this day with and it would be His day. We prayed for God to provide a place for us to host dinner and spend this time with family & friends. We were blessed to use a missionary's home in the area (though they were not going to there) to hold dinner. We celebrated Thanksgiving dinner with 25 people bringing family members and missionary friends together. What a blessing!!! (see pictures below)

Bon-Fire

Wednesday night, Thanksgiving eve, we had a blessed time roasting marshmellows, making smores singing praises and having a great time with friends around a bon-fire at the SIL Center.

MDOC Retreat

We really got a taste of Texas when we went on a retreat with our MDOC group to Three Mountain Resort in Clifton, TX. We've never seen so many longhorns in one place! We rode horses, went on walks and truly enjoyed the wide open spaces! It was great to spend time with our new friends away from the classroom and be refreshed by God's beauty.

November 2007 Herrmann Herald

Embracing Our New Culture

We have been so blessed by our new Church family at the Filipino-American Alliance Church in Arlington, TX. Our very first visit was welcoming and everyone was so encouraging and excited that we were headed to the Philippines!

We enjoyed a Sunday service and returned for their Taste-of-Asia Festival. The food was deliciously different and we made some wonderful new friends who shared with us what life is like in Manila, and the cultural differences we will surely experience when we move to the Philippines in January. It’s great to practice our Tagalog with them and fun to watch them laugh ever so politely as we make mistakes. Not only have we truly embraced our “new culture” but we have been so very blessed to be embraced by loving new friends that will be hard to leave.

Learning...That Lasts…

Learning That Lasts— is an MDOC module where we learned an experiential method of teaching adults. We had just finished up a long week full of teaching presentations involving long nights of preparation. We were tired and growing weary which made “home” feel that much further away and “change” something much harder to endure. We had made a commitment to some very dear friends here to sit with their boys while they attended to some errands on Friday evening. We were so delighted to have an evening to look after these babes, but we were also feeling very tired. Our lives had changed, things weren’t as they once were, our lives as missionaries had begun to take shape, the shape of “ever - changing”. We found that moving to Dallas, felt very much like “someone moved our cheese”

(as described in the book “Who Moved My Cheese”). It’s amazing how reading a bedtime story to three missionary children can remind us of where our focus needs to be and in whom our trust lies.
As we read the story, we were reminded that God moves our cheese and that He does and will

provide for all our needs if we will just follow Him in faithful obedience. How wonderful it is that He lights our paths, goes before us and just when we feel we’ve lost our way, in this unpredictable maze which can sometimes seem very dark and scary, He is right there showing us how to sniff out and scurry our way to “new cheese” which will be so much better if we only just trust and obey, with no hemming or hawing — there is just no other way!

PCC Missions Celebration!

While it’s not Christmas yet, it is Thanksgiving and we thank God for the perfect gift! Prayers were answered when we were blessed to be able to travel home to Rochester, NY for Pittsford Community Church’s missions celebration! It was our first missions celebration as guest missionaries and what a joy to have it be with our Sending Church! We were so overwhelmed with excitement to see everyone, and share what God has been doing that we couldn’t sleep the night before and ended up having little sleep the whole weekend. It was great! We praise God for His people, for our family and friends and for allowing us to take part with you in His work.

We wish you all a most blessed Thanksgiving and a joyous and peaceful Christmas season in celebration of our Lord, Jesus Christ! We thank you for your continuous prayers and look forward to another year of serving our Lord together with you in Christ.

A Visti to Dealey Plaza Dallas, TX

Making Udon

What do you do when you really want to have Udon and can't go out for it?? Make it! Who says more than one cook in the kitchen spoils the soup? We had such fun making Udon with friends! The best part was when each cook droped the eggs in at the end!