With our youngest turning 2 this week (July 18th), I (Beth) have been doing a lot of reflecting.  I thought back to when Owen was born and how leading up to his birth and my scheduled induction, I had been praying that he would come on his own.  All of our children were on the bigger side, and we knew he was going to be as well, so as much as I wanted the induction, I had hoped to go into labor on my own.  So, the night I was supposed to be induced, we dropped our other children...

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    The other day I was reading a book (“Who sang the first song?” By Eliie Holcomb) to Isaiah (4 yo) and afterwards he said, “Sometimes God talks to me, but I’m too busy to listen.”  Talk about a humility check.  I told him, that happens to all of us.  It can be so easy to get caught up with everything going on to listen to God and His word.       Like everyone else, we too are dealing with the result of COVID-19.  Togo shut the borders pretty quickly after we had our first cases in the country of...

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    Yesterday Owen woke up from his nap early and fell back asleep in my arms.  As I was sitting there, soaking up the time just to be able to hold him, I looked around our house, and it hit me suddenly, we really are here!  We are in Togo.  In many ways, we got here and “hit the ground, running” unpacking and setting up our house and it was nice to sit and just rest in being here in Togo.  This is what we have been working towards for a long time now.  I thought back to one of...

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    As we have come into the New Year, we have been doing a lot of reflection.  I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how they were going to choose a word for the new year and as I thought through, I thought, I guess the all-encompassing word that I keep coming back to is “Intentional.”  Our first Sunday back in the States, in our Sunday school class, we talked about fellowship and what that means and one of the words used to take about it was “intentional.”  As I thought about it more, I thought so much about...

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    In preparing our hearts for Christmas, Beth has started going through a book, “Advent, the weary world rejoices.”  The first chapter talks about the song “O Holy Night,” where the book gets the title from and talks about how the song was originally in another language but was translated into English in 1855.  I didn’t realize that this song was originally written in French, and like most songs it was not translated exactly like the original French, but holds a lot of the same sentiment with the hope of waiting to be delivered and that Jesus came to earth...

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