busy weekend!

Just wanted to share a little bit about our weekend - for those who don't know, we serve at a training center for nationals who have a desire to work among tribal people. We've been here almost 3 years, and love it here. On Saturday we graduated 2 families who have completed the 4 year training program. The amazing thing about these 2 families is that they are tribal people themselves. Our coworkers came to their mountain village about 25 years ago, learned their language and culture, and taught them the truths of the Bible. A church was planted there that has grown and thrived, and reached out to other areas of their tribal language group. These believers have a desire to reach out to tribes beyond their own, and they now have the specialized training to do just that. That is sooooo cool to me! They are why we are here. Here they are - the 4 in the front - with our staff (can you find me?). DH and I were both involved on the graduation committee - I generally get handed any task that involves word-processing or design, so that meant creating the invitation, designing and printing the certificates, and designing the 5-meter banner that presented the theme of the graduation ("Looking unto Jesus", Heb. 12:2): I was also involved with the music team, and the decision to keep it a 2-person team greatly simplified that this time! The graduates also asked me to sing a special song, which turned out to be one of my favorites and went perfectly with the skit they came up with. DH created a slide presentation of the graduates, mixed with pictures of tribal people from all over the world - twice during the presentation, a voice boomed out the verse from Isaiah: "Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?" and in response each family shot up their hands and said, "We will!" as they went to the front (ooh, I get goosebumps and misty thinking about it still!).

Today we are tired and sunburnt from a all-day staff outing to a mountain lake...we actually spent the whole day on a little island in the middle of the lake, with a nice covered picnic area - church service and wonderful lunch. I got to sing twice again - once alone and once with a co-worker. Very special time... marred only by the boat ride back to shore, which was truly un-fun. We rode up and back with close friends, and enjoyed that time. On the way home we stopped to visit other friends who had a baby yesterday. Yesterday was also my oldest son's 8th birthday, and poor thing...we were so busy that all the celebration he got was banana muffins in the morning! But he is not one for a big fuss...and he knows we will party when we recover from our weekend. He will kill me but I love this picture of him, taken about a year ago when were in Oregon on furlough:

Happy birthday, dude!