A Moving Experience

After a month without contact with the outside world, we are now in a place with internet access. We sold almost everything we owned and moved out of our apartment mid-January. Our moving day was incredible. Being an apartment building, everything was controlled from times that folks could enter, who used which elevator (going and coming to and from the sixteenth floor takes some time), and where they had to go taking things out. At eight in the morning, there were people waiting in the street to come up and get the furniture and goods they had bought. My wife was amazing and very organized in both selling the furniture and household goods, and then controlling who got what pieces, collecting money from who owed yet and how much. But by five o'clock, the final items were out of the place and so were we.

The first few weeks after moving we spent at our colleagues the Blazers' house in the country while they are on furlough. We've now moved back in to Bauru, staying - our last three weeks - at the house of a family from our church who are visiting the Blazers in Michigan right now. All of our dufflebags were packed at the Blazers' house and will stay there until we leave. And we are living out of one suitcase now.

Along with continuing our regular ministries, we have been packing suitcases and tiing up loose ends -and there are sure seem to be a lot of them. It is amazing that thirty-two years of our life in Brazil is now contained in nine square dufflebags and a box. The airline has been told that we have extra baggage, but we still have to confirm that we can take all the baggage with us on the plane, and pay excess baggage fees.

People have generously loaned us cars after ours was sold. Now we are in the process of changing Brazilian currency we got for the car into dollars. We had to hold a church business meeting to elect a new vice-president and treasurer (our positions on the church board of directors). I never like to lead meetings, but this one went smoothly as we had interviewed and invited people to these positions beforehand, so the process was pretty much a formality. The folks that we trained are now leading the teen program, and people are taking over reception/welcoming and fellowship committees that Sue had been leading. Taxes are never fun, but first we had to find the forms (with the previous owner of the land) and then get everything for the church property changed into the church name has also been an experience.

We also had a baptism service this past Sunday so I could baptize a young man that I led to the Lord and have been discipling. That was a celebration of his faith! That evening a man I had discipled in the past offered to continue discipling this guy - something that had been a concern.

These next couple Sundays I'll be finishing up the eight week series of messages I started the beginning of the year. The last Sunday in February is a farewell service for us, and we leave the following day for Michigan. With everything that's going on here, I don't think we've really realized that we are leaving the life and ministry we've known for so long and returning to another culture that we'll have to adapt to.