Happy Thanksgiving! Merry Christmas! and Happy New Year!
I first will apologize for not getting Christmas cards/letters out this year. Consider this your Christmas/New Year and now Epiphany letter.
We are now over halfway through the Winter quarter at the Seminary, which means halfway through this final year of Seminary. The Fall quarter had us readjusting ourselves mentally to be students again after a year out on vicarage. With 10 week long quarters you feel like just as you have the routine and swing of it going it ends. But our fall was full of so much.
Fourth year Seminarians must do a theological interview and pass it in order to graduate and receive a call. Bryan had his interview with Dr. Gieschen and Dr. Peperkorn on November 15th, and he passed it. Thanks be to God!
Fall this year was beautiful, full of such brilliant colors.
At the end of the Fall quarter we had visitors! Nana and Papa Payne visited from Oklahoma, and then we all drove to Pennsylvania to visit Uncle Jim and Aunt Cindy and their family for thanksgiving! The kids got to meet cousins they had not seen in a long time as well as ones they had never met. We all had a wonderful time catching up and celebrating Thanksgiving together. We even got to visit Hershey Park thanks to Angie! And thanks to the guy cousins for riding the rides with the kids! Uncle Jim took the kids for a ride and Nana and Aunt Cindy had fun crafts.
Winter quarter began at the end of November. Winter quarter is broken into two parts, 3 weeks before Christmas then a 3 week Christmas break followed by the 7 weeks of classes to complete the quarter. We did quite a bit of traveling over the Christmas break and were able to visit family in Oklahoma for the holidays. We visited Great Grandma Roggow in Enid, Oklahoma and Nana and Papa in Lawton Oklahoma. We then spent the week after Christmas in Oklahoma City with Agogo and Papa and many more cousins. Keah is so thankful for her flexible job that she could even work while in Oklahoma!
The weekend following Christmas we even drove down to Galveston, Texas so Bryan could preach at St. John Lutheran Church. The humidity and fog welcomed us to the island, but we were warmly invited into the church and enjoyed chatting with many people before and after church. We debated taking our time driving back North but decided we would rather get home and rest before the kids went back to school, so we drove straight back, stopping only once overnight in Durant, OK where we got to spend time with Shawna, Eleanor, Mr. and Mrs. Dewald.
Back in Fort Wayne we did all the laundry and got prepared for studies again. Classes started back up and we didn't quite get back into the rhythm before Bryan had his gallbladder removed. Back in October, after the last post, Keah took Bryan to the ER late one night due to extreme pain in his stomach. We were told it was not an "emergency surgery type of thing" and to follow up with Bryan's general MD. That started us on a trail to figure out what was wrong. Bryan was sent to a GI doctor who ran more scans/tests and finally gave the diagnosis of a significant amount of gallstones and his gallbladder needed to be removed ASAP. The GI surgeon who removed it just happened to be the GI surgeon on call that day back in 2020 when Keah had her appendix removed! Thank you all for all your prayers throughout this! Bryan is doing very well now. He attended his classes last Thursday and Friday (might have done a bit much) but he is healing and getting a little stronger each day.
