The Story Develops

As you may have heard we resigned Sunday, Aug. 24. Many in the church were shocked--at least most said they were. There were tears and hugs. Many were very affirming of our pursuing an overseas position which was a positive twist to the resignation.

Interestingly, on Monday morning, Aug. 25 MCC invited us to a 3-year position at the Gindiri College of Theology in Nigeria. Doug will be teaching Bible, ethics and theology. There are 8 schools on this campus, so they assured Miriam there would either be a position in teaching or administration for her. They advised us to wait until we are settled to decide on what she would be doing.

Orientation will be in Akron, PA, the end of January until Feb. 6 and then we would fly out from there. We will have three months of culture and language study (Hausa) in Jos before moving to Gindiri. We will be receiving more info from MCC over the next weeks about the specifics. This is pretty much what we know right now. Oh, there is a staff house on campus that we will be living in--does have electricity--when there is some. Apparently there is some house help (good thing--laundry has to be done by hand) but I heard she only speaks Hausa--incentive to learn the language!

As you can imagine some days, actually most days, we don't know if we are up for this. It seems very huge--this transition, packing, saying goodbye to family and church family of more than 14 years. . .we need all the prayers you can muster!

We are meeting with Ivan Beyeler who is a realtor (in his retirement) to make some decisions about the house. We think we would like to sell, but are not sure if we can get enough out of it with the housing market so depressed. We may end up renting. . .those are things we need to sort out--along with a myriad other things. Maria did a lot of painting outdoors this summer and also helped with painting the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. She has her room packed up and Charissa will take care of hers when she comes home for the weekend in a few weeks.

As you can imagine, we're feeling a bit overwhelmed in thinking about sorting, packing, storing--what to keep, what to get rid of, etc. We will also have some housecleaning to do at the office before we leave. Mim says, "I have been so busy keeping up with the"regular" stuff lately (and hosting people-- three Kenyan pastors, one for two weeks and two other houseguests over Labor Day), it makes me wonder when I am going to find time to deal with the extra. It will happen, I'm sure. We will continue to try to keep you in the loop. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers on our behalf over these next weeks and months.We did receive a welcome package from MCC this week - it was an email with 26 attachments (more than a hundred pages of details). The country representatives from Nigeria are also preparing a package but indicated that they didn't want to overwhelm us this week. We are thankful for that."