April 25th
Bryan received his call to serve the
Office of International Missions of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod
as a Theological Educator in Tanzania, Africa.
The reason they announced that we will be in St. Louis, Missouri District is because the headquarters for the Office of International Missions is located there. Missouri will be our assigned district.
Where in Tanzania? Shinyanga, 2.5 hours south of Lake Victoria.
What is there? A training center and the beginnings of a
Seminary.
Have you ever been there before? Yes, we visited this past
December, 2022 (more to come on this!)
When will you leave? Most likely in January, 2024.
Why not immediately? This call requires some additional
training as well as some fundraising.
So what's happening now? We are completing our studies. We
have two more weeks of classes. At the end of the second week, we will BOTH
graduate. Bryan with his Master of Divinity and Keah her Master in Deaconess
Studies. We will then immediately downsize our entire household belongings to what
fits into a 16 foot trailer and move it back to Oklahoma. Then we start training
for our mission assignment this June.
Keah has quit her job with Just Neighbors in order to focus on downsizing the household during these last days in the home. We have moved so many times (4 moves so far since selling our home in Oklahoma City) and we still have a great number of random things we cling to. This year we have been working on downsizing, and we are getting there. We are not there yet, but it is such a great feeling to have less - less to clean and make a place for. It is hard though. One of our big projects is scanning as much as we can so we have digital reference materials and memories. The folks at the library are getting really familiar seeing Keah’s face every Monday, Wednesday and Friday as she spends some time scanning to email all kinds of documents.
We continue to work with Calvary Lutheran Church in Plymouth, IN until the end of this month. Bryan will preach one last time there on May 28th. They have been such a blessing to our family, and we will miss them very much!
What do the kids think? Well originally they thought it
would be just another amazing Wyoming like adventure. But over time we have
told them more and more about Tanzania, and while, yes, Wyoming’s culture is different than
Indiana and Oklahoma, it is still inside the United States of America, still in
the same Country, and Tanzania is it’s own country on a different continent (Globes really help when teaching these things).
We are beyond thankful for this call! This has been a long
time in the works. We have yearned to return to Africa since returning from it
in 2010. We wanted to return in a way that would be most helpful for the people there, and teaching pastors and deaconesses will be most fruitful for the Church. In
order to do that we chose to start down this road which has led us to this
point. We are excited to prepare for the next steps and the journey to come.
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.'” (Mt 9:37-38)
