Prayer cabin

Last week I (Tim) spent a couple days at a prayer cabin at The Wilderness Fellowship, (http://www.wildernessfellowship.com/), in Wisconsin. I went up on Monday afternoon and returned Wednesday about noon. My purpose was to seek the Lord about what the next couple months should look like. All I took was some simple food, my running gear, my Bible, and my Ipod with some worship music on it. I am extroverted enough that the solitude started getting to me after a while but that was also when I felt the closest to the Lord. Each day I took a walk on the amazing trails and also went running to clear my head. The worship music helped me prepare to pray and I also spent some significant time in the Gospel of Luke. I strongly recommend the prayer cabins as a fantastic way to connect with the Lord while avoiding distractions. It was a great experience and I am glad to have had the chance to spend such quality time with my Lord.

I did miss Heidi and Jackson an awful lot while I was gone.

Father's Day

Today was my first Father's Day as a father. When I look at my little guy I feel a sense of responsibility that I have never felt before. I love him so much and want to do right as his father. When I worked at Rawhide Boy's Ranch, I noticed that there was one thing that was the same with every single boy at that Ranch. Their fathers were all either physically or emotionally absent. Children need fathers in their lives. They can have the most wonderful mother of all time but still grow up a mess because they lack a father. American society has undervalued fathers and many men have shunned their role as a father. Men need to embrace their role and stand up for fatherhood. Let's get moving, fellas.

By the way, happy father's day, Dad. I was one of the fortunate ones. Thanks.

Pretty cool.

Weeks ago I (Tim) wrote a post about how we felt the Lord was telling us to give away our car even though a guy from the oil change shop offered $550 for it. Well, we did give the car away instead of taking the money. A few weeks later we were given two checks from friends that equaled $550. God is good.

Jackson's update in pictures

One thing that we really enjoyed about being at MTI was the closeness of the trails. Jackson LOVED being carried along in the Bjorn.

Here he is livin' it up. Oh the life of a baby!

Tummy time!

He's learned how to spin around at his little play gym. He used to love it, but I think the novelty is wearing off....although you can't tell that by his expression in this picture.

Here's Jackson hanging out with uncle Larry.

A nice one with grandpa Chase and daddamomma.

Playing catch-up

Before we post some (of the many) pics from SPLICE, we need to catch up and a put up a few from PILAT, the language program that we attended first.Here is a picture of our class along with all the teachers. What an intense couple weeks!

Bryan and Sarah are some fellow Navs that we met a couple years ago at a fundraising conference, they do collegiate work in Oregon. And they were in CO at the same time for another conference with The Navigators. It was great to see them and introduce our boys!

Our new friend Laurie from PILAT who will also be serving in Senegal!

Over Memorial weekend, we also got to see some good friends up in Boulder and meet their little guy!! Mandy and I were college roomates and she and Kyle live in Wyoming now. The Denver area has served us well as a great meeting point!

Now we are at the Glen for about 40 hours for a little sabbath rest and family debriefing time before we head home. It just didn't seem right to finish 5 weeks of intensity and jump in the car to head back to our new normal. SPLICE was amazing and I think we will continue to process all we learned for a while. Some on the blog, some in our journals! But there are more thoughts and pictures to come.

The Colorado Adventure Continues

Here is Jackson meeting his paternal Grandmother for the first time. She was pretty excited.
These are the instructors for our language training, Barbara and Dwight Gradin. They were fantastic and we learned a tremendous amount from them. Their language acquisition techniques are cutting edge and we are excited to put them into practice. We are much better prepared for language study thanks to them.
Jackson spits up a lot. Some of it gets on his Daddy.
On a Saturday afternoon we did some tourist stuff. This picture is at the Manitou Cave Dwellings. We toured the dwellings and visited their surprisingly cool gift shop. Afterward we cruised the shops in Manitou Springs and ate Mexican food in old Colorado City. It was an enjoyable day.

We are now in our second week of culture learning after two full weeks of language. It's all valuable training and we are glad to have this opportunity. We have made some great friends here and get to look at the mountains all the time. Can't complain about that.