Pictures

We’re really enjoying Tabitha.  She is 12 weeks old now!  She can smile and laugh, and it seems that she’s discovered her hands recently.

As you can see, she can hold her head up very well.

This is a lower perspective shot of our budding photographer.  Notice the lens cap on the right side.

This is the upper perspective.  Even though it looks like shrimp feet growing out the right side of his head, it’s not.  Just an illusion.

And here’s Ruthless … I mean, Rufus … I mean, Ruth

She’s a beauty!  It’s amazing how, regardless of the time spent fixing hair and beautifying a two-year-old, she still seems to have this look.

Concerning the ministry here, it’s been going very well.  We’ve been working with three churches here in Sydney for the past two months.  One mainly Chinese, one mainly Lebanese, and one mainly Filipino.  We have helped with music ministry, evangelism, preaching, piano tuning, prayer, music teaching at a school, and many other things.  It’s been a lot of fun serving the Lord here.  As I’ve gone through the picture files, I have realized that we didn’t take very many pictures of our ministry here, so we’ll have to start on that today.  We have another week here, and then we head down to Melbourne for a VBS for a week.  Then we move after that to a town in the southern part of Melbourne.  We’ll be there until we leave, Lord willing, on December 1st.

I was going to try to upload a video, but I just found out that it’s more involved than I care to get into.  So I’ll just post a few pictures.  It’s such a blessing to have connection again.  I’ll try to post a bit more later, especially about what we’ve been doing.

They’re so helpful!

Two peas in a pod!

And here’s the newest addition . . . at about seven weeks old.

Kangaroos

It seems that people always ask us if we see kangaroos while we’re in Australia.  We took this picture in April in Mt. Gambier, South Australia, after we had finished packing up to leave a youth camp we were helping with.  This kangaroo wasn’t in any hurry to leave.  We usually tell people that they’re just like white-tailed deer, pretty much.  Similar grazing habits, etc.  So as often as you think you might see a deer (especially at the edge of the forest at dusk) is about as often as we see kangaroos.  No, we’ve never seen a koala in the wild.  We don’t really expect to.

Recent Pictures

Caleb and Ruth love to read together.

This is a man from the church we’ve been helping.  He and another girl were baptized a couple of weeks ago.  Please pray for spiritual growth for Attila and Jill.

These are two university students from Nepal.  They came to the church looking for someone to tell them about Christ.  Someone from this church had given them a tract in the city, and they had come one Sunday to try to find the church, but couldn’t.  So they tried again the next week, and James was able to talk to them.  They both understood salvation, and both of them trusted Christ.  James has kept up with both of them, and they are enjoying reading the Bible together.  Please pray for Suraj (Soo-rej’) and Subash (Soo-bash’).

Ruth enjoys caring for her bunny and surrogate dolls.

She’s full of mischief.  We’ve discovered lately that she really is a sinner . . . takes after Caleb.

Exciting Finds!

The other day, we did some laundry at a local coin-op laundromat.  While waiting for the laundry to finish, we went for a walk.  Caleb got really excited and said, “Look, Mommie!  It’s a cubby house!”  He saw something like this:

We thought it was cute that he thought a porti-potty was a cubby house.

After our walk, we went to a little park and swung a little on the swings and slid on the slide.  Suzanne looked up from helping the kids with the swings and saw a sewing machine in the garbage.  So she took it home and cleaned it up.  It works!  It’s a 1953 Singer “Style-O-Matic” and there was a free downloadable manual for it online.  We’ll have to send a picture later.

James’ class went well on Tuesday, and he’s had several opportunities to visit with different people.  Suzanne taught a flute lesson on Friday, and that went very well.  We all took part in a Bible study on Friday night, and it was exciting to see about 20 people attend.  We’ll give more information on these things later, Lord willing.

Happy Fall!

We’re enjoying the cool weather here in Melbourne.  We have been staying at Calvary for about a week now, and it’s been very good.  We had ministry with Melbourne Bible Baptist Church on Sunday morning, and they had a luncheon to follow and a baptism at the beach.  We enjoyed being a part of that.

In the evening, we went to Calvary Baptist Church and enjoyed good fellowship with our friends there.  It’s been good to be around people that we’ve had ministry with before and whom we know.  A missionary from the Philippines spoke and showed his presentation.  His three daughters sang “I Am Happy in the Service of the King” in both English and the dialect of where they’ve been ministering.  It was a blessing.

This coming week, we have James teaching Apologetics on Tuesday, prayer meeting Wednesday night with Melbourne Bible Baptist, check-up with the midwife on Thursday and a couple of piano lessons in the evening (James going out on visitation during that time), a flute lesson on Friday afternoon, and witnessing in the city on Saturday night.  Please pray for each of these things as you remember them.

We’ve Moved!

As of this past Saturday evening, we’re living at Calvary Baptist Church in Melbourne!

So much has happened in the past 15 weeks that it’s too hard to try to catch up with it all right now, but the picture that you see is of Ruth’s birthday.  We had cinnamon rolls instead of cake, so that’s what her candles are on.

We hope to post things on the blog much more frequently, now that we have an unlimited connection.  Hopefully, that means that we can fill in the holes of the past weeks.

Summer Days

We’re enjoying our time here so far.  James preached for Sunday school and the morning service at Lavington Baptist Church.  His S.S. message was about seeking the Lord with the whole heart.  His morning message was about Jonah.  He asked three main questions:  What is your Nineveh? What is your storm (and fish)? and What is your gourd (and worm)?  It was very good, and I think there were quite a few people who were helped.

We were able to get all of the appliances that we need for the travel trailer at one place.  A man gave us a good deal on all of it, and we were very thankful to get the things taken care of.  Now the cabinets and cupboards need to be made.

James went to teach in Melbourne today, and the kids have enjoyed playing outside.  I filled a tub with water and toys, and they played happily outside for a while.  Nothing like having Summer all over again!

Busy Week!

This past week has been very busy, which is why I haven’t taken the time to create a new post since last week.  I’m sure I can’t remember everything of what’s happened, but I’ll share some of the things.

We had been praying about and working on buying a travel trailer out here, and last Friday, we began the process.  We now have it sitting in the yard where we are staying.  It needs some improvements, which we had planned on before we got it, so we have been working on designing these improvements and getting prices for the different materials.  A couple of our friends (Colin and Ande) are planning to work on it in the next couple of weeks.

James preached in Mt. Beauty last Sunday morning, and we were back at Lavington (Albury) for the evening service.  We had a choir practice at Lavington, and we prepared some music for it, so between traveling from Mt. Beauty (1:30 minutes) and preparing for the choir, and getting to choir (4:30PM), our afternoon was very short.  But we had a great day, and it was wonderful to begin working with the choir.

On Tuesday, James went again to teach in Melbourne, and we went with him.  We stayed overnight with some friends (the Fieldings) there, and picked up the travel trailer (2+ hours west of our friends).  We had an interesting day between traveling, getting the trailer and organizing things with the bank.  But eventually we got going.  We ended up running out of gas due to a faulty gas gauge and miscalculations due to a new trailer on the back, and we stayed overnight with some friends (Bryce and Kelly) in Violet Town.  That’s a whole story in itself of God’s goodness to us, but it’ll have to wait until later.  Suffice it to say that we had a great time with our friends on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

We came back to Albury on Thursday morning and began working on arranging some music for a friend’s wedding (Dave and Hannah) and organizing things for the travel trailer.  We went out to a farm to have dinner and a music lesson with some friends from Lavington (Chris and Rachel).  We had a good time with them and got back fairly late.

On Friday, we did more preparations for the travel trailer and had several lessons with Bethany (flute and piano) and Matthew (piano) Davies.  In the evening, we had the children’s ministry at Lavington, and James preached at that.  I think the age group was about 8-12 years old.  We stayed and helped clean the church afterward and had a good time of fellowship with some friends (Ande and Katie).

As you can tell, we spent a lot of time with friends, but we can see how the Lord just provided different opportunities all along the way.  We’re so thankful for the ministry He’s put us in, and we look forward to seeing what He’ll do more in the future.  Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

We spent the day on Thursday going to Melbourne to look at travel trailers.  We went to two places where we had seen some we were interested in.  For the past two years (at least), we’ve looked (mainly online) to try to find one that would work for us, but we haven’t found anything.  The ones we were interested in looking at Thursday turned out to be different than what we thought, but we saw one in the process that we thought could work.  A friend of ours had mentioned that he would be willing to do some carpentry work on one if that was needed, and we decided to go ahead and get the one we saw and have it fixed up.  So we are now in the process of being the owners of a travel trailer in Australia!  James is planning to pick it up on Monday morning.  I’ll post pictures of it later.

I hope everyone has a Happy Valentine’s Day!