Day 1

Today’s focus included more intro/orientation and a lot on growing a community. We have lots of little communities within this whole community of missionaries-singles, parents with kids here, parents without, different roles, different countries, different races, and different ages of kids, different, different. Yet, we ARE a community. We talked a lot about being vulnerable and sharing your heart. We talked about those things that are below the surface that we don’t always know about before we judge someone’s actions and responses. We had more time today to start talking and connecting and hearing stories from people.
We keep talking about community-we both keep hearing the Duluth fog horn from Joe Sourchey!
My (KJ) growth group is a baby boomer going to Sudan, a nurse going to Uganda, a gal going to Ethiopia (don’t know much about her yet, they had horrible flights getting here, so were late), and a single gal going to China.
Brian’s groups is the husband of the gal to Sudan, the husband of the one going to Ethiopia, the guy going to Mozambique I mentioned yesterday, a guy going to Guatemala and a guy going to Argentina.
Praise! We are not the only ones here “without a seminary education”. We are also not the only ones here doing agriculture related projects. The Ethiopia guy also is doing something related to ag and windmills. Oh-and we aren’t the only ones who hate role playing!!!

PARADOX-two seemingly contradictory statements of which both are true. A word we learned about this morning. A word I’ve heard but never really understood before. The ACTS course I (Brian) have been doing is a paradox. How so? In the material we are studying I see a mold/agenda of how they think missions should be done. I don’t fit that mold-does that mean one of us is wrong in how we view missions? NO! Yet we don’t totally agree; and that’s okay. The difficulty is laying both statements (arguments) side by side without weakening one of the statements-being able to allow yourself to see the validity of the other statement. The hard part, at least for me, is not feeling like someone just attacked you and you have to defend yourself or go on the offensive. Then what do you have-conflict. And that really brings out our (my) most unChristlike behavior and attitude. This is just one of the things we are going to be learning over the next three weeks. Fun, fun, fun.

PRAYER REQUEST-please pray that the kids will adjust to the time change! Pray that Brian will be able to sleep-the bed is not working well for us. We may need to get an air bed from the local Wal-mart. Please pray that the lack of sleep will not lead to a migraine.