Back in Tampa

Here we are in Tampa once again. We left Italy from Naples back in on August 12th. Amanda and I were extremely thankful to have Peppe, one of the Italians involved with Agape Italia, take us to the airport at 4am since our flight was about an hour drive's away leaving at 6:45am! The whole travel process from Naples to Denver where we had the STINT briefing conference was 23 hours. (We will talk more about that conference in our newsletter in this month). Everything went smoothly for the most part until we got to our layover in Frankfurt, Germany where from there we would fly straight to Denver on a 10 hour flight. We had a few hours so we got coffee. We tried to our terminal but there was a large German policeman who put up police tape and told me I could not go to Terminal C. I preceded to ask in English if there was another way, in which he replied the same statement he made before. I guessed that he probably did not understand English and walked away. We ate lunch and the tape was not up when we came back, but we had to go through customs and everyone was at lunch at 12:30 so no one was at any of the Passport booths. To make a long story not as long we made it to the gate with like 5 minutes to spare from when our plane was going to take off. To make matters worse on the flight my personal LCD monitor was not working. Thank goodness Amanda is good at sharing :)

We arrived in Tampa on Wednesday the 19th of August. From that time through the weekend we had a lot of family commitments including one of Amanda's baby showers. Monday was the first day that we had some time to finally catch our breath and figure out our plan for the few months we are here in Tampa. Basically what we will be doing is as follows(in this order):

1. First and foremost, have a baby. I am trying to serve Amanda the best way I can during this period.

2. Raise extra monthly support. We have lost a few hundred dollars of monthly support and plan to loose a few more because of the economy and we have to raise about $800 more of monthly support. (I have updated our thermometer on the right side of the page with the latest numbers).

3. Do language learning. I am going to try about 10-15 hours a week to learn Italian. I meet on skype with Andrea for 6 hours a week. Amanda is going to build off what she has already learned in class.

4. We will be helping out with the ministry at the University of South Florida which is about 10 minutes from where we are staying in Tampa. We found out that two of their staff left last year after we decided to pursue the endeavor, so we were an answer to prayer for them in some ways. I think it will be good for me to continue in ministry and sit under another healthy ministry before we go back.

Please continue to pray for us because just as we were getting used to Salerno, we are back in Tampa. We understand the Lord is this is more of the process that the Lord wants us to go through in order to prepare our hearts for ministry in Salerno.