He makes wars to cease

Today's Psalm, 46, contains this verse:

"He makes wars to cease in all the world;

he shatters the bow and snaps the spear 

and burns the chariots in the fire."

Truly today, making wars to cease will take supernatural power.  You may have heard that hospitals were bombed in Syria, for the 5th time.  If anything there can be worse, then surely targeting the places where people go for healing is diabolical.  All sides are blaming the other.

Closer to our hearts, the country of Uganda is less than 48 hours away from elections (Thursday the 18th).  President Museveni, who has been in power for 30 years, faces two challengers who were formerly his colleagues and allies.  The democratic process in Uganda is tenuous, fraught with tension and suspicion.  Today one man was killed and 11 wounded as police fired rubber bullets at close range into rioting opposition crowds (article here).  Would you please pray for a peaceful, fair election?  For ordinary people to be heard, and to be safe?  For our school to proceed smoothly, as teachers are in their training week with the new Headmaster in place?

And once you warm up on Uganda, don't forget Burundi where 5 grenades were thrown in public places yesterday, killing at least two.  While we are thankful that Hope Africa University, where our teams work, was able to hold graduation last week, recruiting new students into a situation of insecurity and poverty remains problematic.  And once you have prayed for both of those, you will be ready for the greatest challenge, South Sudan.  Our team is now settled in exile in Arua.  Today we talked on the phone, and the international food relief that was finally reaching the displaced people around Mundri did not get distributed due to more fighting.  The tribalism, fear, and violence are augmented by economic collapse.  People are desperate.  It is hard to see an end to the cycles of death.

So in this context, a verse like Psalm 46 strikes me as remarkable.  Our God makes wars to cease.  Destroys the very instruments of war.  It is hard for me to believe that tonight, but I know it is possible that God will do something dramatic in our region.  Let us be still and ask God to be glorified in a saving peace, particularly for these places in Africa full of people we love.

Bragging about the Son

I love the little country church near our farm, where a half dozen people felt inspired to come and shake our hands in welcome this morning even though we came in late and the service had started, and almost to a person they asked if we had walked to church in this sub-zero weather (we had), amused in a delighted way by our idiosyncrasies.  Being Valentine's Day, we were almost the only people not wearing red or pink.  The pastor, in fact, had a bright pink t-shirt on under his formal white button shirt (and his red-hearts-with-cartoon-characters tie).  He explained that his lack of fashion wast to illustrate a point-we all noticed the pink showing through, just as God sees the hearts of all people under whatever we put on top to show the world. But my favorite line today from the sermon:  If you want to please God, try bragging on his Son.  As a parent, I can relate to that.  What is better than having other people notice how great your kids are?  So, here are a few brags about Jesus, and what's happened this week.

Katuramu's smile

The class of 2007

First, we got the gratifying news this week that Katuramu Taddeo, one of the young men who attended Christ School on a scholarship for orphans, in Luke's class, successfully completed his final exams in medical school.  I remember six years ago, on a disaster-laden trip to Gulu to support the girls' football team and Julia, we took Katuramu to try and get him an admission to that medical school, and failed.  But God opened another door, and in partnership between the funds raised after Dr. Jonah's death and a couple from Florida, he was able to complete his degree at KIU.  You would never guess from this kids's cheerful heart that he lost both parents and has taken on jobs from shoe-repair to tutoring to make it through school.  He is a gem.  His nick-name in secondary school was "Pastor".  He and Luke competed in a way that spurred each other on.  We rejoice that God saw him, put him in the right place to get this degree, and will bless many in Uganda through his life.

Ivan and our kids at his A-level school

Another of our "foster-sons" Ivan got his A-level scores this week, with successful results.  Another, Kadima, preparing to graduate with a diploma in Agribusiness Management, sent his final transcript with grades worth celebrating.  These are kids who have to work hard to overcome their less-than-ideal start in the world of education, and we rejoice with them.

And another, Basime Godfrey who already graduated from University a few years ago, sent the good news that he and his wife had a baby girl, Natalie Atugonza.  Their first child died because of the difficulty of accessing a C-section when labor arrested.  This time thanks to our team on the ground, we were able to get him funds in advance, just in case.  Which proved to be the difference between life and death, because another C-section was needed, and all are so far well.  Keep praying!

Our former Team Leaders Travis and Amy Johnson celebrated milestone birthdays this week (hint, they are twice as old as they look, and way younger than us).  Nearly 3 years ago (in March) Travis was diagnosed with an aggressive colon cancer.  Those three years have been a long battle, with hopes risen and dashed and risen again.  As treatment continues, we rejoice that they were able to have a blast (it looks like!) romantic Bday trip, and we keep praying and hoping for full healing.

Baby Eliana, the pre-term little girl born to some of our missionaries in Nairobi, gained enough weight to go home.  Cheers!

That's a list of spotting places where God has graciously given recognizable gifts this week, where it is easy to brag on Jesus.  But in every single story, there is an undercurrent of pain as well.  Those boys who are graduating are still facing a life stacked against them.  Those babies have a long way to go.  Those friends are still battling cancer.  As an excellent must-read article by Kate Bowler put it today, "Life is Beautiful.  Life is Hard."  And that sums it up.  The paradox of bragging on Jesus is that Jesus doesn't always do things the way we wish.  But he is always good.

A rending invitation, Lent begins

Now, therefore, says the LORD,

Turn to Me with all your heart,

With fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.

So rend your heart, 

and not your garments;

Return to the LORD your God,

For He is gracious and merciful,

Slow to anger, and of great kindness;

And He relents from doing harm.

Joel 2:12-13

Today marks the beginning of Lent.  Though we spent most of our lives in the kind of protestant churches that don't recognize a yearly liturgical calendar, which is fine, we also have grown to see that when God meets us He does so in space and time.  And knowing how humans need tangible reminders of truth (such as the feasts of the OT worship), it helps our hearts to purposefully remember the Incarnation for the Advent month before Christmas, and the Crucifixion and Resurrection for the 40 day-Lenten fast before Easter.

Repentance, in Scripture, is an invitation.  It is God inviting us to come in, to sit down to supper, to listen and bask in Presence.  To turn aside from evil, from fear, from self-centered rat-wheel exhaustion, and turn towards the only relationship that can satisfy our hearts.

That turning can feel painful at first, prying our fingers off the little hand-holds on the climbing wall that we think are keeping us aloft.  That rending can feel frightening, until we swing out in the freedom of the harness and find that Jesus is doing the belaying.

Here is a link to the excellent Biola project, that combines music, art, Scripture, and a meditation for each day.  Join us in the journey.  Let's pray for each other, because true repentance requires the clarity of the Spirit at work in our hearts.  Pray we would hear Jesus' invitation, and find His kindness.

Remembering Hope, on February 8th

Twenty-three years ago this morning, in Baltimore MD, our first-born son reluctantly emerged.  After anxious months of preterm labor and bedrest we made it to 36 weeks, then all that hurry-up turned into not-so-fast. . . and after a LONG night, as the C-section was being planned, he finally emerged.  I won't say that we became parents 23 years ago, because that happened two years earlier when we were first pregnant.  Which is why today is a milestone of hope kind of day.  We don't forget the scars of lost babies-in-utero.  We don't forget the darkness and ache, particularly as we walk through the same with others.  But we also celebrate life that overcame death in the end, in a very tangible way in our story.  When I want to re-write life as it is pounding on my friends, I think of Luke, and remember that I don't understand divine grace enough to know what is around the corner for others, only to testify that what came to us was so good.  Insightful, courageous, funny, diligent, crazy, thoughtful, a whirlwind of creative and passionate dreams, a guardian of family tradition, a promoter of his siblings and friends, and just all-around one of our favorite few people in this whole world.  The last time I actually spent his birthday with him he turned 16, but this year we caught almost 48 hours together for carrot cake and hikes.

 Then

Now

And as we have spent the last 6 weeks nearly continuously on the road, we've run up against plenty of sorrow.  The three young couples we long to see healed of recurrent miscarriages tug at my heart and prayers.  And also in my daily prayers, families with kids our kids' ages struggling with mental illness and homelessness.  Then the long list of cancer, kidney failure, Alzheimers, injuries.  Unemployment.  Estrangement.  We have thoroughly enjoyed reconnecting with many old friends, thanking many faithful supporters.  Doing this face-to-face though, means that instead of the quick two sentences on facebook or a card, we have heard a smattering of the depths of life's punches.  Sobered, we walk away grateful that these friends still make room in their hearts for people like us, on their periphery, and for the needs of people in East Africa, even further out.  

But perhaps there is a connection.  While I might expect the suffering to be too poured-out to open their hearts to more evidence of the world's mess, instead they are the empathetic and generous fabric of this world, the people whose perseverant faith against all odds makes a difference.  So we humbly salute our friends on February 8th, recognizing the prayers that laid the foundation for our life and our children's survival, and the kindness that follows us through the last 23 years.  And purposing to lean into the same prayerful bearing of one another's burdens during this sabbatical, because here we stand as a testimony to hope, and as long as we have breath we will pray for those that are still waiting for their day of joy.

On evil, and telling stories to children

I was asked to write an article for an on-line magazine dealing with how we protect our children from evil, and the use of story.  If you're interested, just use this link and page through to pages 6-10 (it makes cool page-turning sounds too).

Even though the book has not sold as many copies as we hoped, it has done much better than the average first-time-author attempt (or so they tell me to cheer me up).  And New Growth Press has begun preparing the second book in the series for publication.  Any promoting of A Chameleon, A Boy, and A Quest to your school, library, bookstore, home-school group, whatever is much appreciated!  It's hard to break out beyond our own small network.  Thanks.

Here's a sneak preview of the next cover:

Zika, Math, Preparedness and Panic

If your news-feed doesn't have enough to scare you from Donald Trump, then the Zika virus is probably filling the gap.  Once again, Uganda gets the bad rap of being the site of discovery and the source of the name of this virus, which avid colonial-era scientists found in rhesus monkeys inhabiting the Zika forest in 1947.  The virus rarely infected human, but the mosquito which transmits Zika is the same one that transmits other more prevalent diseases like dengue and yellow fever.  The virus also jumped continents via world travel, finding non-immune populations and causing rapid spikes in transmission resulting in epidemics in Micronesia (2007), French Polynesia (2013), and then (courtesy of World Cup football) Brazil and the Americas (2015).  And unless you were a medical student preparing for exams, or a viral research scientist, you had probably never heard of Zika virus until a month ago.

In November 2015, Brazil began to publish reports of an unexpected increase in cases of babies born with extremely small heads.  They collected 4000 reports that year, represented a 20-fold increase in some areas over historical trends.  In a handful of cases, an autopsy or blood tests showed evidence of exposure to the Zika virus.  Temporally the two trends have been associated, so a hypothesis was suggested.  So far so good.

Then in lightening-fast fashion, we went from an observational report to a massive world-wide crisis and panic.

Why?

A foreign-sounding name, the vulnerability of pregnant women and young babies, the terrible headlines with words like "shrunken heads".  The culture of blame, so that if officials don't sound the alarm fast they are later liable.  The sense of guilt over the ebola non-response.  The moderate level of anxiety that is whipped up constantly by our access to skewed information.  

First, the math, because truth usually begins and end with some calculations. Brazil has a population of 200 million people (about 2/3 of the US population).  They have a birth rate of about 15/1000 so we'd expect about 3 million babies/year (about 3/4 of the 4 million US births per year).  Now the tricky thing is how do we define normal and abnormal for head size.  Generally we do this by creating a database over time of massive numbers of babies at various ages, documenting their weight, length, and head circumference, and when the number of babies per size and per age are graphed, you get a "normal" curve.  There is an average size, that tails off to the high and the low.  95% of babies fall within 2 standard deviations above and below the mean.  Statisically speaking, about 2.5% of babies would have a head circumference below 2 standard deviations (33 cm), which in Brazil would be 75,000 babies and in the USA would be 100,000 babies.  Most of those would be normal, just the kids on the smaller side.  So for truly talking about microcephaly, we usually take 3 standard deviations below (32 cm) as a cut-off for severe, where only 0.15% of people should be.  That's 4,500 Brazilian or 6,000 American babies.

In America, the teaching is that we have about 25,000 microcephalic babies /year based on a cut-off of 2 standard deviations (link here), which would mean that we are missing 75,000 of those we statistically expected to find.  I'm guessing that's because those are normal kids who are small and don't get reported as microcephalic.  If you look up incidence of microcephaly, they don't always define the problem well, and the numbers range from 1:6000 births to 1:250,000 births (giving expectations in the USA from 16 to 667 babies/year), 10 times below the numbers we would expect statistically.  That also makes sense to me, because while size is normally distributed, at the low low end of head size we don't just have small cute babies who are normal.  That's where we have babies whose heads are small because their brains didn't grow properly in utero.  Babies with chromosomal rearrangements and deletions, babies whose mothers were exposed to teratogenic substances, babies who were infected with diseases known to affect brain growth.  Also in the USA abortion is legal, so it is hard to know how many abnormal babies never make it to birth.

OK if you're lost now, that's just the point.  Do 4000 microcephalic Brazilian babies represent a shocking increase in incidence, or an admirable increase in detection?  Are more microcephalic babies suddenly being born in Brazil, or did the suggested association lead to raised awareness and reporting?  We don't know.  Some states are using head sizes below 33 cm, and some below 32, to report.  Some are reporting all babies, some only those with a suspected Zika association.  This epidemic is still spreading, and 80% of cases are asymptomatic, with the rest being mostly mild.  If there an effect on unborn children, perhaps we never found it before because the numbers were too low (in semi-immune populations) to be noticeable, or the infections were occurring in places with less medical access.  

For now, the panic is escalating way out of proportion to the known risk.  For a factual scientific read on all the details, look here.  Having a baby with microcephaly in most cases means a lifetime of struggle for the family, physical and occupational therapy, feeding challenges, special education.  It is not something to be taken lightly, and if this media frenzy does anyone good, I hope that it leads to increased empathy for families who already have children whose brains have not developed normally.  I hope the surge of attention attracts funding for resources for microcephalic kids of all stripes.  There is a long, long list of potential causes.  Zika virus may be one more cause on the list one day, but a temporal association is not strong enough evidence for causation.  

In the meantime, kudos for global thinking, and it's pretty much never good to get mosquito bites.

Epiphany

Today, the twelfth day of Christmas, much of the Christian world celebrates revelation, light, seeing.  The arrival of the Magi to the house where the young child was, a celestial marvel attracting foreign scholar-priests to the obscure village of Bethlehem.  The homage of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, acknowledging this baby’s royal and divine lineage with an overtone of inevitable mortality.  Camels, horses, foreigners, unsettling signs, wonders.  The trigger which unleashes local paranoia, an attempted genocide, flight. 

As it happens, my Old Testament reading today ends the book of Ruth, also largely set in Bethlehem.  And coming on the heels of Urbana’s emphasis on multiculturalism, and on reading one of the speaker’s books (Disunity in Christ, by Christine Cleveland), I’m struck by the intentional orchestration of God to mix things up.  Sending Naomi and family to Moab, drawing in Ruth, bringing her back to Bethlehem, and through the desperation and scheming and hope of two widows, a story of redemption where Ruth enters the family tree that produces King David, and then Jesus.   Fast forward a thousand years, and another very intentional stir in world events brings these mystical scholars to meet the infant Jesus and return to their diverse lands enlightened.  The birth of God, to the Jews but also to the world.  So the exotic caravan of foreign dignitaries enters the small village, and then the cosmic disturbance explodes in dreams of warning, angels, escape to Egypt.  Another foreign connection.

Today then is a Christmas completion, good news for all peoples, which includes us in all our obscurity and injustice.  God intentionally draws the world to Jesus and sends Jesus to the world.

And appropriately, we are celebrating this day on the road.  Our twelve days of Christmas have been largely in motion, and much of that motion is motivated by homage to the hidden King of creation.  That same birth compels us to go, and provides connection and respite along the way.  In the Jesus-to-the-world category, we have stops along the way to share what God is doing through Serge and thank those who make it possible.  Formal seminars, cups of coffee, telling the story, we go as pilgrims compelled by the Love that mixes cultures intentionally and plucks a couple of Americans to uproot themselves and cross the ocean to serve other nations’ children.

But in the world-to-Jesus category, the last week has also been an experience of the awe of receiving. Sometimes I think of the mark of Cain, which protected his life, and imagine we are marked with a subconscious sign that propels people to be kind to us.  I imagine Mary opening the door to a retinue of gift-bearing strangers, and I think I know how she felt. 

We have stayed with people we had never previously met, who opened their homes to us because of the Kingdom.  We have had friends gather, and relatives gather, bending over backwards to match their schedule to our lone hour of passing through.  We saw Scott’s aunt, uncle, and cousins for the first time in 15 years.  In Colorado we were treated to three days in a restored ranch-house just outside Breckenridge with overflowing hospitality including the use of snowmobiles and cross-country skis and a hot tub, connecting with a kindred-spirit family over meals and conversation, a true Sabbath inhale after the pouring-out of Urbana. Grandparent Christmas gifts gave us an extravagant day of skiing one of the world’s most spectacular sets of slopes.  Jack learned to snowboard from Caleb, and our family (minus Luke, sadly) spent the day riding the lifts and crisscrossing the mountainside together, lifting our eyes up to peaks over 14,000 feet tall all around us (Scott and Caleb took the highest lift in North America to the double-black-diamond bowl at the top).  One day we hiked within a snow-ball throw of six moose, majestic animals crunching through the snow-cover to graze.  As we dropped Caleb back at the academy, we spent the night with a doctor-doctor former Air Force couple whom we met at a mission conference.  After dinner the wife showed me the house and then said, we would like you to bring your family here for graduation, you can stay and we will leave the house to you that week.  I cried.  USAFA graduation accommodations cost thousands and thousands of dollars and have been booked for years, yet in our helpless inefficiency we were given just what we needed by virtual strangers.

So this Epiphany we celebrate from the viewpoint of the holy family, being given gifts by kings.

And that is part of our testimony, serving the God who sees.  Who prompts people with resources to generously share them with us.  Who orchestrates friendships and meetings and car mileage and paths for our good, and, we hope, the world’s.

URBANA 15: pick me up to write your story

We are closing the year here in St. Louis, MO, along with 16,000 college students and a few hundred mission organizations and leaders, with the theme "What story will you tell?"  Once upon a time, we were students ourselves, attending Urbana in 1981 and 1984.  I remember the colored pencil manuscript Bible studies, the heart-breaking stories from Helen Roseveare, the Scottish accent of Eric Alexander, the midnight communion then trekking through the snow for our all-night bus rides home. Our "Africa Team" committed ourselves during the 1984 Urbana.

Fast forward the story by 30 years (!) and here we are again, only now the event has moved from the bleak utilitarian university and dorm setting to the skyscrapers of downtown St. Louis with it's convention center and football stadium.  The artistry, in music, drama, videos, lighting, integration of themes, sheer movement of thousands of people have all taken leaps ahead.  The worship team has gone to great lengths to be multicultural in content and appearance, celebrating diversity, and to be professional in quality.  The art and drama enhance the truths taught through the Gospel of Matthew.  Our main speaker is the head of OMF, a doctor from Hong Kong with detailed and deep scriptural analysis sprinkled with inspiring stories of OMF missionaries.  Besides the Matthew study, there are a dozen or more other speakers sharing their stories, plus about 200 seminars on a vast array of topics in the afternoons, plus hundreds of exhibitors.  It is dizzying.

A few months ago we volunteered to lead a couple seminars, and were thankful to make the cut.  On Monday we spoke to a couple hundred students on "Child Health in the Majority World:  A Billion Reasons to Hope", which was part public-health stats on the improvements in child mortality in the last 25 years (we've gone from over 12 million under-five deaths/year to just under 6 million), part evidenced-based medicine examining which interventions actually work, and part missionary-testimony talking about what we believe are best practices.  Yesterday we tackled a more emotional topic:  "Risk, Safety, and Faith:  Missions in an Age of Ebola and Terrorism."  As per the conference theme, we told some stories of our own struggles with risk and loss, and examined Jesus' story as an example to us of incarnation (taking on the reality of the people we are reaching), the cross (the path of suffering is the path of love), and resurrection (risk becomes worth it when the redemption of the world is at stake).

When we're not attending the morning and evening massive gatherings in the dome, or speaking in afternoon seminars, we're on the Serge teams at our booth.  We make ourselves available to talk to students, to ask questions, to listen to their concerns, to pray for them sometimes, or to just encourage and offer options for their journey onward.  It is sometimes loud, chaotic, tiring, exciting, fun, draining.  Our Serge team does an amazing job of really ministering to students who are at times confused by the uncertainty of their future, and looking for God's leading.  We also represent our teams as we look for connections with people who can boost them.  Last night we were one of nearly 50 pairs of leaders serving communion to the crowd of students, which was a joy, blessing them over and over, one by one, a moment of individuality in this crowd experience.  Just getting in and out of the halls in flows of massive crowds, or managing to get food, or find our family, can be a challenge.

Yes, find our family.  Jack, Julia, and Caleb are attending as college students themselves.  Experiencing this worship together, discussing the topics speakers bring up, working together at the Serge booth, have all been a priceless gift.  We miss Luke but he is studying diligently for his board exams coming up in a month.

And perhaps that has been the highlight for us, processing the experience in a way that helps us understand our own kids' reality as people raised in Africa and immersed in the American University Culture.  This Urbana has not yet really felt like the call-to-leave-all sort of classic mission-promoting conference of old.  Maybe that comes today, in the final sessions, I hope we focus on what story GOD is telling. But Urbana has tackled some important issues head-on, namely racial tension in the USA, the persecuted church around the world, and our approach to Muslims.

The first day and a half were largely focused on issues of race.  Which felt authentic, since the conference is on the doorstep of Ferguson, in a year marked by tragic injustice and loss.  It also felt uncomfortable at times, as speakers grappled to both acknowledge that weighty iceberg of history that we would rather not see below the surface, and to sound a clarion call towards reconciliation, which was mostly excellent, but at times simply sounded angry and divisive.  My favorites were Christina Cleveland's appeal to move from a dichotomized view of the world separating us from them, to a trinitarian-based view of us-only, unity without loss of uniqueness.  And this quote from an activist named Michelle in one of the videos:  "The goal of activism is not to defeat a person who is your enemy but to defeat the force that is making you hate each other."  Amen.  If only we could truly keep that in mind.

While the call to bring the church to the nations has not sounded so loudly, the truth that the church exists in suffering and danger in many nations has been beautifully and soberly shown.  One night we were invited to bring candles (battery ones, of course) onto the floor of the arena and pray for believers who suffer persecution in about 8 different countries around the world, including Kenya and S-lia.

And lastly, in a climate of American politics where Muslims are presented with fear and blaming, it has been refreshing and courageous to see Urbana speak with calm, loving, joyful rationality.  Several speakers have told their own stories of coming to faith, and pleaded with American/Canadian college students to listen, to build bridges, to pray, to be respectful, to present truth with love.

Tonight we will end 2015 with most of our family, enfolded in the Serge family, and surrounded by the family of God.  The spiritual battle is real, as we tackle racism and persecution and as we move towards others in love.  This spiritual battle feels palpable as we meet a few blocks from the Mississippi river which is flooded to its highest stage, ever.  The conference ends at midnight, at which point we move into the next year and the rest of life.  Pray today that many many students grasp a bigger view of their own story within the context of God's story, and take courageous steps to join wherever that leads.  I'll end with a chorus we sang last night:

O God, here am I, send me, use me for your glory.
O God, here am I, send me, pick me up to write your story.

Christmas and Motion

The Christmas highlight of 2015 will be, for me, celebrating with four kids in a real home, a place we are working to make our "basecamp" for decades to come.  We are still a family of pilgrims, but having a specific spot tied to family history, a spot that is ours, where any of us can land when we need to, means a lot.  And even as I consider that, I know that it was not true of Christmas two thousand-plus years ago, when Mary and Joseph had no place to call home.  And it has not been true of many Christmases for us, when we've been displaced by war or on the move.  So while I truly am thankful for our wood-burning stove-warmed kitchen, our hand-me-down table and plates, our new comfortable beds, I know that Christmas was more than a glow of lights in a West Virginia mountain hollow.  The gathering of people whose hearts are bound to each other makes the home, and that can be mobile until we are all rooted together in a New Heavens and New Earth.

So with that in mind, we celebrate the moments and the memories.  Taking Granddad to play putt putt golf with the hunch that once he held the club and was oriented to the hole, muscle memory would take over.  It is no small thing to find an activity that engages late-teens and mid-80's, so let me recommend miniature golf.  He was far better at it than the rest of us.  Except Nana, who with her 5 foot frame and laid-back personality was never the family athlete, but came out of nowhere to hit 4 holes-in-one.  The shock on Scott's face and the delighted surprise on hers were priceless.



Then there were the little photo albums of baby pictures my mom put together from the stacks of old pictures as she moved.  The cousins all remembering the old days and poking fun of each other as we celebrated with my family, the fun secret-santa gifts, the creative putting together of Christmas in a hotel room where we all met the weekend before.  Memorable.



Music flowed during the rainy days back at home.  Caleb's siblings decided that the main family Christmas gift would be an amplifier and loop pedal for him, so we had some jam sessions with our 80 year old minipiano and multiple guitars.  The special Scandinavian treats, with Nana teaching Julia to use her own grandmother's rosette iron, and me making lefsa that even impressed Granddad.  The traditional annual puzzle project.  Abundant meals, lingering conversation, games, movies.




And because we are still cross-cultural in some ways, we made cookies and went caroling to some neighbors, and found a local Christmas Eve service as well.  West Virginia has plenty of Angel Tree kids.  Small ways to give to others.

On Christmas day itself, the first firing of the new pizza oven, with leisurely production of gourmet pies.  And if you can't beat it join it . . . days of rain and milder temps inspired a family dip in the frigid river that runs by us, with some adventurous kayaking.  Probably the first time ever for pizza or a kayak on Christmas, but hey.

But the cozy days (all four of them) of home-for-Christmas came to an abrupt end on the 26th.  Luke went back to Charlottesville to study intensively for his board exams, coming up in a month, and weighing him down with oppressive hours and determinative outcomes.  (Prayers appreciated, particularly as he strained his back and is in a lot of pain).  He went by way of Dulles to get Scott's parents to a flight back to California, while the rest of us dismantled the tree and packed our bags.  By early afternoon we were on the road to St. Louis, with an overnight in Louisville.  And we'll be on the road for all but 2 nights in the next 5 weeks.

Which brings us to Urbana, the biggest student mission conference in North America, held every three years to worship God with thousands and thousands of college students, focusing on God's merciful heart for all nations.  Tornadoes and floods pounding the midwest give this event an apocalyptic feel.  We were awakened at 4 am by harshly alarming cell phones warning of flash floods for our area, but since we're on the 16th floor of a hotel we went back to sleep.  In a few hours Scott and I will give a seminar called "Child Health in the Majority World:  A Billion Reasons for Hope."  There are exhibits, booths, books, speakers, chatter, music, lights, and a lot of damp cold young people asking God for purpose and direction.

Christmas in motion once again, our brief respite and taste of home now a memory in the more realistic life of pilgrimage.  Pray for us to move in faith, and to see the hand of God as we go.

Christmas Letter

Merry Christmas!!

CLICK HERE to download our annual Christmas Letter - full of pictures and a re-cap of 2015 in the life of the Myhre family.