So much has happened since we last wrote! Big things. Good things. God things. First, we have only $137 left of our minimum monthly budget set by Wycliffe! Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who have stepped along side us in this calling! We are so close to 100% it seems unreal. It feels like it was just yesterday that we were going about our normal lives, oblivious to this uprooting that God had in store. And yet is was about two years ago now that God awoke Nori's heart and then stirred the rest of us. It is truly hard to internalize that serving the people of Papua New Guinea is finally around the next corner.
Since we are so close to completing our partnership team, our supervisors have gone ahead and given us the green light. Last week we bought our plane tickets! We will fly out of Raleigh, NC on May 10th for 28 hours of flying (that includes only 4 hours of layovers!) to Papua New Guinea. That puts our last day in the Charlotte area on April 26th. The goodbyes have begun. We will be out of town most of March, but are relatively free in April, so if you want to get together one last time before we go, give us a shout.
In other news, the Pacific Orientation Course (POC) we were scheduled to attend on the coast in Madang, PNG in May has been canceled due to logistics. But the supervisors in Ukarumpa (the place in the Eastern Highlands that we will ultimately be serving in) have decided to host the POC training there. We are very excited about this news; it answers quite a few things that we have been praying about, and we are pleased to be learning the ropes in our future hometown.
Lastly, we are still waiting to hear back about our work permits. We cannot submit our visa application without these approved and in place. Please cover this with extra prayer this next week, we are hoping to get good news on that front any day now.
If you have not partnered with us yet, don't worry, you are not too late. Please ask the Lord if this is something that He would have you be a part of. We are so humbled and excited over our partnership team that God has called together, and we would still love to take you with us on this journey.