Wednesday, November 14, 2007
MDOC Retreat
Sunday, November 11, 2007
November 2007 Herrmann Herald
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.