Dear Friends and Family,
We hope you are well in mind, body and spirit. We are praying for you and continually grateful for you in our lives! We believe in the power of speaking a blessing over an individual, a neighborhood, a city or a country, and singing a blessing can be just as powerful, if not more so. A song called “The Blessing” was released just about the same time that Covid-19 was starting to take hold in the west. It is a powerful declaration of God’s favor and peace straight from scripture. Tom and I led this song bilingually in our church service a few weeks ago and we would love to play it over you! We have made a little video with the words so you can sing with us (in english and in french ;) We hope that you feel our hearts as we worship and declare his goodness over your lives.
Family Update
Here’s what’s new with us: We are on day 39 of our strict quarantine in France. We have only left the house to go to the grocery store, boulangerie, or do our allotted one-hour of exercise within one kilometer of our front door, all the while carrying our time-stamped papers to avoid a hefty fine. We are all well and feel tremendously fortunate to be in our home with a beautiful yard in early spring. We will be here like this until May 11th, and then the world will slowly start to open up again, but not as it was before. We are taking it one day at a time.
Though we are home ALL THE TIME, the days are very full of activity. We have been working through the assignments sent daily by the kids’ teachers, watching music classes online (thank you Mark Woodward), doing crafts, playing a lot and cooking a lot. We have a daily assembly where Tom teaches the kids about important qualities like strength, respect, grace etc. We had a fancy “High Tea” where we dressed up and had scones and cucumber sandwiches and we celebrated Carnival with face paint and costumes, and parading around the yard in the traditional French style. We also have begun a vegetable garden in two raised beds, but we had more seeds and more time, so we decided to dig up a few more plots of earth to plant more vegetables. We celebrated Easter and Tom’s birthday with as much tradition as we could with frosted cakes and dyed easter eggs.
And of course, we are doing chores, cleaning, learning to do laundry without a washing machine and then rejoicing in its miraculous healing! The kids seem to be doing remarkable well, the adults have our wobbly moments but we are finding grace in the midst of it. We are very grateful to have Lauren, our nanny, with us, though the circumstances have not been what was expected. She has been very helpful and more and more a member of the family. We expect that she will be able to return home in June as planned. God is very good and His timing is perfect.
Ministry Update:
You may remember that back in February our friend Gerard who runs the Bless network with his wife Chrissie had a health emergency. Gerard is on the mend and he and Chrissie are in the UK recuperating. Thank you for continuing to pray with us for them. While they rest and recover, Tom has taken on a much bigger role in covering leadership for the Bless Network. Thankfully, Bless is an amazing team of people and while leading a missional network through a crisis was not part of the plan for 2020, we are seeing blessing in it.
Tom is leading online gatherings using Zoom twice a week for the three churches in our network here in France. As we are hearing from friends in other parts of the world - God is on the move during this time of limitation. It feels like our church community is going deeper with the Lord. Our times of prayer and reading the Bible together are so powerful and we are noticing a marked increase in the way we, as a body, care for and reach out to each other. We’ve also seen growth in numbers in this time. We’ve had rather large Sunday gatherings in part because friends of the church from the UK or other places in Europe are “visiting”, but we’ve also seen neighbors and friends coming for the first time to our church. There is something kind of wonderful about having first time visitors at a virtual service.
Many of you have asked about what is happening with SOS Chai and the refugee community we are connected with here in Caen. Thank you for continuing to pray for these young men, who are among the most vulnerable in our area. While we have had to stop our bi-weekly dinner and hang out with the lads, we are able to continue in relationship with several of them through messaging and phone calls. Thankfully, one of the lads who has been granted asylum and has been helping us as a leader at SOS for about a year lives very near one of the squats where many of the boys live and is able to communicate about need. We have worked out a way to send him funds and he is able to take other boys shopping for essentials.
The summer is a busy season for Bless, especially with groups coming and going. Tom has been busy with leadership teams working to make decisions, adjustments and communicate well about the changes that we’ve needed to make. Like almost every organization, there are financial impacts for Bless from this pandemic, so there has been some stewarding work to do as well.
In all the ways God has made for us to join in what He is working, we are so thankful to feel well supported by you, our friends and family. Several of you have reached out to check in on us and see how we are doing. Thank you. We also love to hear how things are going with you. We so appreciate the way we feel deeply connected and on mission with you.
We also have the joy of working in wonderful teams here in France. Bless network has been family to us and it is inspiring to work alongside the amazing people we’ve met here. Our mission agency, GEM, has also been very supportive in this time. We have a weekly connect with our GEM France team and there are daily opportunities to pray with other GEM missionaries around the world. Here’s a video from GEM president Jon Burns, which he asked us to share with you. We so appreciate his heart for all of us, missionaries and those who send/support us, to be cared for well in this time.
We would love to meet and pray with you, talk to you “face-to-face”, as we all are learning to do more these days. We are very grateful for the opportunity to do so at this time. We hope to see each of you soon and we pray this blessing once again over each of you:
