Coming Together

There's a lot going on right now and it's good to see this whole thing coming together.  For the past couple of years, it's been a lot of steps always leading to something rather far off.  And now we're about to see the biggest of steps and it's pretty near.  In our last newsletter,  we asked for prayer over lots of things that needed to happen and in the last month, lots of things have.  Here's a summary of our recent victories:

We finished our exams and we're done with French language school.  Exams at our school are by far the most stressful thing we've dealt with in many years.  Monday, June 30, we had our closing ceremony and received our diplomas followed by a small party at our school.

Chris, with his French professors, Cécile and Anne-Marie

Lori, with her French professors, Anne and Catherine

We have started selling off some items.  My bike was the first thing to be sold.  We have two other bikes spoken for already, so that's a huge load off of us.

We have already received our Cameroonian visas.  The paperwork and fees were sent a couple of weeks ago on a Wednesday and we received them back three days later!  We were blown away by the promptness and seamless service from the Cameroonian consulate here in France that handled our visas.


We finalized (read: paid for) our plane tickets.  We got a pretty decent deal and the flight times are as ideal as one can get for flying into Yaoundé.  We'll be leaving from Geneva on the 29th of July and flying through Brussels on our way to Yaoundé.

Some faithful friends from Lynchburg delivered our items for shipment to Cameroon to the JAARS facility in North Carolina about ten days ago.  This was weighing on our minds, worrying about how we would engineer the delivery from afar, but we are so thankful for those that took care of this for us, as well as for a fellow missionary at the JAARS center who met them and helped get it all taken care of.  We had all of this stuff stored in Lori's mom's basement in Virginia during this past year.  It will be included in a container to be sent to Cameroon in late July.  We hope to see our things in about two months after that.  In the shipment are several kitchen items, some school materials for the kids, my tools, some audio recording gear and some of the kids special items (lego, stuffed animals, etc.).  And going above and beyond, the faithful delivery drivers also added some mosquito nets to our shipment.  Amazing!

Some of our things headed for Cameroon.
Thanks Kelly!

We sold our car, "The Silver Bullet."  It was a bit of a process, having to get it inspected (required here before a sale can happen), having some work done on it, dealing with government paperwork (this part reminds us that language learning will never end…).  We had a ton of fun with that car, but it's nice to have the sale wrapped up before we leave.  The Silver Bullet will spend the next year in the Paris area with one of my colleagues, a fellow missionary who will be interning at a church of African expatriates while taking some theology classes in French before heading to Ivory Coast in a year.

Our faithful friend that climbed
 many a mountain this year.

Some other faithful friends arranged for us to have some things shipped to Cameroon.  One family facilitated the shipment of a crockpot and a clildren's Sunday School class from Grace 210 EPC of Hampstead, NC is going to send some school supplies for our kids.  Also amazing!

I've arranged the closing of our bank account, internet/phone account, and mobile phones.  This is hard because of having to do this over the phone (talking on the telephone and understanding jokes are the two hardest things in your second language).  But we're getting through it.

What remains is to arrange our transportation to the airport for the 29th of July, sell a few more things, and pack.  But in the meantime, we're grateful for answered prayer in seeing many things checked off of our list before parting.