What an adventure!

Wow! You guys are going to be busy this summer! Sounds like fun! Our summer will be busy, but a different kind of busy than we've ever had before! We're trying to hang on and trust the Lord to work! Our last Sunday at Glenwood will be June 12th, just 3 weeks away! (A little shocker for us--until yesterday we were planning for a July 10th departure.) After that we will be fundraising and moving! Ben will still do YouthWAVE, but I'm not sure if I will go or not. Then he has Camp Victory the last week of July, but I'm not sure if he will still go or not. Ben's family is coming for the first week of August, so I know we'll be at the lake then. Things are quite uncertain for us at the moment.

Regarding this weekend, it looks like we will need to come to Midland/Odessa on Thursday and look at houses on Friday. We will come to Brownwood sometime (probably late) Friday. Since we only have 3 Sundays left we will need to come home from the lake on Saturday afternoon to be here for church on Sunday. So we won't be around much this weekend, but look forward to whatever time we'll have with everyone!

I'll skip everything else for now and get to the fun part! We had an absolutely wonderful vacation in Destin! Thank you so much, Mom and Dad! It was such a special week for us! We flew to Pensacola, rented a mini-van and drove to Destin last Saturday. Alex and Katy loved our condo--beach on one side, pool on the other! It was amazing! We played in the sand and water for hours, saw dolphins swim right by our condo a few mornings, went crabbing and even had a few dozen hermit crabs as pets for a few days! The kids were absolutely delighted. We thoroughly enjoyed our kids and just relaxing. We didn't think about our real life much, and that was a really nice break! We had an extremely emotional few weeks telling our church family about our move, then physically exhausted ourselves getting our house ready to put on the market before we left. (We had someone come look at it just moments after we walked out the door, and she even made an offer! At that time we thought we would need to be in the house until mid-July and she needed to be in sooner, so it didn't seem like the right one.) We were ready for the rest!

We were a bit concerned that first night when Alex awoke at 1 a.m. screaming with an earache. He cried for a long time, we called the ER, Ben went to the store for Ibuprofen and Triaminic (both orange syrups...)and he finally went back to bed sometime after 2:30 a.m., still crying but knowing that we couldn't do much for his earache (flight-induced). Randy, I almost called you. We were headed to bed around 3 a.m. when he screamed again. I ran to his and Katy's room, where they shared bunkbeds and knew right away from the smell that we were going to have to turn on the lights. (Warning: Anda may not want to read any further!) He had leaned over the top rail and projected vomit over the entire room, spraying walls, windows, floors, Katy's bed, decorative pillows, sisal rug and furniture. The good news was that his ear popped and he felt much, much better! We spent a good while cleaning up, getting the kids back to sleep, and were finally ready to go to bed when Elijah woke up! We weren't laughing at the time (remember we were exhausted already!), but we are already laughing about our first night in Destin! Thankfully, it only got better and better from there.

We look forward to hearing about the rest of the "Christmas" vacations from the rest of you! Meanwhile, we are praying fervently that God will go before us and with us as we make this transition and we need your prayers as well. I knew it would be faith-building, and it gets more that way at every turn. It's going to be one step, one day at a time, much like the Israelites who just had to follow the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. We're just trying to follow where God shows us.

So much more to say, but I will leave it for our time together this weekend!

Love you all,
Trisha