Our church in Loja surprised us with a video for all of you who are praying and supporting us.  We hope you're encouraged by this video!  

Here is a video that we recently made.  I hope that you all are encouraged by hearing about what God has been doing here.  If you have any questions, just let us know.  May God bless you.  

I think the first thing that is in order is why the blog has been so silent. There are really two reasons. One is because we were having some problems with the website itself. We've moved it to a new host and everything is now working. The other is that we've been busy moving and getting settled in here. So between the website not working and everything else going on, it's been hard to break the silence and start writing again. Not the best of excuses, but it's true. If you haven't been following us on Facebook, you've probably missed quite a bit. Here is a quick timeline since the last post.

Have you ever made multiple phone calls and no one answer and then think, "Is this phone working? Do I even exist?" It seems like when we go a while without real interaction with people we begin to doubt. The other day I was reading a book about crossing cultures and ran across this quote.

“Because I speak no Portuguese,” Moritz Thomsen wrote of a trip through Brazil, “and have chosen to move through those parts of [Rio de Janeiro] where tourists do not go, I find after a few days of not speaking that I have begun to doubt my own existence”

Storti, Craig. The Art of Crossing Cultures (p. 102).