Post Fay

The Tropical Storm is finally over!!!! I have to eat my words a little about getting a little bit of rain because some places around here got about 2 feet in like 4 days. Things were a little dreary with us not seeing the sun from when it went down last Sunday night until this past Friday and us not having many appointments. God did provide Amanda with two part time steady jobs which is a total answer to prayer!!!! We are focusing on this week and things are already 10 times better than last week with much more appointments and no storm. We also are looking forward to this weekend with Josh and Cheree's wedding this weekend, as I am a groomsman. Just a little update...thanks everyone for their prayers!

<--Josh and Cheree

Tropical Storm Fay and the storm we call our lives

Ahhhhh......Hurricane....no tropical storm....headed for Tampa....no headed for us...nope headed for Fort Pierce and we have some rain. I love when this happens and it always does. The storm changes direction and the weathermen are not really predicting where the storm is going but are really more like announcers in telling us what is happening. No one knows what LeBron James is going to do before he does it so why should we know what God's wonder of the hurricane is going to do?

Anyway enough of that because I can go on and on. Amanda and I are still going strong. Appointments have gone down a little this week but the Lord is still good! We are at about 23% of committed monthly support! We are still learning how to work together, we know how to be married as two working professionals, but not as two missionaries on one car and with one computer. This season of our lives has definitely pushed us closer together making us rely more on each other than we were relying on each other before. There are so many things that both of us have a say in and have to work together at them like never before. In staying with storms, we can call our lives a storm sometimes. With all the crazy stuff that happens in everyone's life one can be drowned by the rain, tossed by the waves or "storm surge" and blown about by the winds and feel like things are not fair. In Matthew 8:23-27, Jesus calms the storm when all the disciples were afraid in the boat. What gets me about this story is that Jesus was asleep when the storm was going, He was already calm before He calmed the storm. It does not matter how large the storm, He is more powerful than any of it! We can trust that even though storms come, Jesus will calm them. His disciples did not have faith, He called them out for it and still calmed the storm. We can trust Jesus to calm the Tropical Storm Fays of our lives!

Meet the team

We thought that we would introduce you to the rest of our team so that you can put some faces with the names. So here they are...

First, this is Jutty and Abbey Valiquette. Jutty is going to be co-leading our team. In the picture are their two children, Bryce, on the right, who is 16 months old, and Addison, on the left who 4 months old now. They are leaving for Salerno very soon so please be praying for their travel. It could be pretty tricky with the two kids. Here's a link to Jutty and Abbey's webpage if you'd like to check it out: www.justinandabbey.com





Next we have Amanda Craig. (Yes, that's right, 2 Amanda's on a team of 7 people, I can't explain it). She is co-leading the team with Jutty. Amanda has been living in Italy for most of the past few years. She's been in Orlando this summer raising support and receiving some more training, so we've had a chance to get to know her a little bit which has been a blessing.








And finally we have Bentley and Sarah Love Crawford. They both attended Ole Miss and interned there with Campus Crusade for the past year. Before that, Sarah Love spent a year moving on the campus in Salerno. We got to know them this summer too during New Staff Training. They are both very friendly and certainly have that southern style to them, if you know what I mean.













So this is them! These are the people that we are going to be ministering with for the next few years. We are so excited to be there. Just working on this post has reminded me (Amanda) of how much we want to be there soon. Jutty and Abbey are leaving in the next week and Amanda is leaving a few weeks after that. Bentley and Sarah Love are still raising support like us so they don't know when they are leaving yet either. I can't wait for the day that we are all there together. I know God will do it, all of it in His timing.

Support Raising has begun!

It's hard to believe that we have been working on raising support for 3 weeks already. The first week or so we spend a lot of time moving out of our apartment. The next questions becomes, well then, where are you living? Our friends Ryan and Sherry have opened up their guest room for us during this phase of support raising. It's been fun already. Living in community is certainly encouraging. However, Ryan did just get a Wii video games system for his birthday so it's hard not to let that become a distraction at times, but we're doing good so far.

Some people have asked what support raising really look like. What do you do with your time? We have been asking that same type of question over the past several weeks too. We want to be good stewards of our time and work hard everyday. But at the same time we know that we need boundaries and responsible expectations for ourselves so we don't burn out. The evenings are the busiest times for us. We try to have an appointment every evening where we are meeting with someone in their home for dinner or dessert to share about the vision. Any evening that we are not meeting with someone, this is crucial time that we can be on the phone with people, setting up upcoming appointments. During the day on Saturday and Sunday afternoon are also great times to make phone calls. On weekdays during the day time we do most of the administrative type work, sending thank you notes, emails, logging information into our support raising database, etc. We also have a correspondence seminary class that we are working on each week. It's a New Testament survey course and we're supposed to be investing about 5 hours a week listening to lectures, completing the readings and assignments. So with all of that, we seem to be staying pretty busy. I've attached a couple of pictures of Rodney working on support stuff, on the computer and on the phone. Those are the two main places that we are most of the time.

Anyway, I hope this gives you a little bit of a picture of the logistics of support raising. I know, I didn't really share much about how we are doing emotionally and spiritually, but at least I got a post on the blog. That's a start, right?