Christmas Thank-Yous

It's Christmas and I'm feeling unusually reflective. We sent an email round a couple of weeks ago telling folk our car had been stolen, but one of the things we'd been thinking about is all the stuff we were thankful for in the midst of it all. Well, we continue to choose thankfulness in the middle of the "down" moments in life, but actually, as we approach Christmas there's so much to be thankful for IN the circumstances (and not just in spite of them)!

Our car showed up a few days ago. It wasn't burned out, crashed in a ditch or had "i love my mum" spray-painted down the side. It looked pretty good actually. From what we can tell, he must have even parked it nicely as it took our fine constabulary a couple of weeks to realise it was a stolen vehicle. Even more amazingly, apart from a few empty CD cases (our thief seemed to be a bit "intelligence challenged", if you know what I mean) there wasn't really a lot taken from inside either. It looks like he just fancied saving the bus-fare home. Our keys have a "reward tag" on them, provided by our insurance company, promising a £10 reward for anyone handing them it at the Halifax. Our entrepreneurial car thief decided to maximise on the opportunity and try to claim his £10 reward for 'finding' our keys. he wasn't too happy when he found out you had to leave your name and address and asked for the keys back. The woman at the Halifax pointed out that they'd already established they weren't actually his keys and he decided it was time for a hasty exit.

So; we have our car, we have most of our stuff and we even have the key back (which saved us quite a fsmall ortune!). As a family, we've spent a good chunk of time over the past few days being thankful to God for all the ways he provides for us, but on this Christmas eve, we are drawn further into thankfulness as we consider a creator God who chose to leave the splendours of eternity and arrive into this world via a stable.

East Meets West

Paul: I've been traveling again. This time to Northampton. Nice not to have to get on a plane to go somewhere! It was a gathering of all our HR leaders from around Europe. Normally, organisationally, we split Western and Eastern Europe up, but for the first time (to my knowledge) we had 3 HR leaders from Eastern Europe come and join us. Yuri from Moldova and Sasha from the Ukraine joined John, based in Hungary. It was a fantastic time: sharing stories of the stuff that's worked and the times we've crashed and burned, getting emotionally involved in case studies and examining resources that will hopefully move us forward.

It dawned on me (as it has a habit of doing during times like this) that the role of caring for and developing missionaries is quite an isolated, misunderstood, under-equipped and under-resourced role in many of our countries around the world, and actually, Western Europe is doing pretty well when compared with so many other places around the world.

A few people have quizzed me & Lesley recently about whether there is really all this need for galavanting about so much. It's a good question and one that we wrestle with regularly, but this conference (and a number of emails I got while I was there) reinforced again the need to equip people to serve the servants of God. I do hope and pray that one day we'll have built up the competency and confidence within our ministry around the globe that my hands-on resourcing won't be needed as much (we're certainly working on some models that I hope will get us there). Until then, we'll carry on wrestling with stewarding God's resources in the best way we can, in order to see His plans accomplished.

Thanks for being part of this too.