Miesha is a M & M

I love M & Ms and I love Miesha...

Love Letter = Animals!

In my mom's group at church a couple weeks ago we were talking about "love letters from God" to people. The idea is from the book Captivating. Basically it is something in your life that is unique, unexpected or supernatural and is special and meaningful -basically it is like God shouting "I love you" to your heart. I am not explaining this very well...

Anyway, last Thursday I met up with some other missionaries at the Botanical Gardens to celebrate my teammate Sarah's birthday. As I was waiting for everyone, I saw around 100 butterflies in 15 minutes. I LOVE butterflies. I was pretty excited because I thought this was God's love letter to me this week. Then, about an hour later, I saw a pretty large tortoise. I have NEVER seen a tortoise at the Botanical Gardens and this was my 6th or 7th visit. I was excited and asked the Lord - is this the love letter? I kept walking around the garden and by the time Miesha and I were back at the entrance gate we had seen 3 tortoises and two funny looking rodents, a crazy colored grasshopper and this waterfall.

Both Miesha and the tortoise didn't want thier photo taken!

Even in the middle of a massive, crime filled city - there are still evidences of God all around me if I take time to look for them.

Then, today Dan brought home this funny looking creature:

He was working on our pastor's computer at the church and the groundskeeper found this cameleon. He was bright green when calm and turned real dark when we introduced him to our cat!

The Papaya Song is BACK!!!!!

Hello Everyone!

This has been a full week for us!

We really enjoyed family camp with our church last weekend. We caravanned with a family who just joined our life group and ended up being the first ones to arrive. We walked around the grounds for around 30 minutes and then unloaded everything quickly since the first storm of the rainy season was upon us! We haven’t had a good rain since June so this was welcomed, but it did complicate things a bit for family camp! There was intense thunder and lightening and the municipality of the county kept turning the power off to keep the lightening from damaging things. We ate all of our evening meals in candle light and had the evening sessions and talent show illuminated via generator. It was great atmosphere, but challenging because of all the mud and having to stumble around in the dark! We would do it all over again in a heartbeat. We loved getting to know everyone a little better.

Our Life Group's "Talent" for the talent show was pretty funny. We taught them two songs that were favorites of Dan's middle schoolers - The Papaya Song and Pharoah Pharoah. We made total fools of ourselves all dressed up in Dan's Hawaiian shirts and doing exaggerated motions - it was a big hit.

We were guessing that after a weekend of playing at camp together that no one would come for the evening service to hear Dan preach. We were joking all week about the four people who would come! We were pleasantly surprised to find out that we were wrong. Dan printed 60 fliers to hand out and there were not enough for everyone. This was the first time that our church had heard him preach and he did a fantastic job!! It fit perfectly with the flow of the sermon series we had been going through all month and also the sessions at camp. It was timely, encouraging, and really blessed people.

We had lunch with the pastor and his wife on Monday afternoon and they asked Dan to consider joining the preaching rotation and also to be available to be a substitute pastor to teach when other pastors in the denomination are away. It was tremendously affirming! Thank you for all of your prayers!

In the 7 days of this week we had 11 meal meetings with different ministry partners. (Lots of eating!!) These last few months have taken us out of our usual communication with them and it was good to catch up with so many people. This week we hope to connect with a few more as well.

Dan is also working on the Thembe Orphan Homes in Pretoria again this week (or maybe it is next??). He loves serving through using his hands and tools!

Miesha is yelling at me wanting her breakfast and we have to dash off to church now. We love you all!

Tounges

Who do you think she looks like now?!! I hope this is a phase...

(We teach our daughter bad habits when we are bored on long flights!)

New Hartley pictures

We were asked to contribute a picture of the three of us for a church missions pamphlet something or another and they needed it ASAP. We drove to the church and our friend Luke was photographer for us. As you can see by these photos...Miesha isn't quite sure about him!

Or, maybe she is just tired of us trying to capture her cuteness on camera...

I do love this one...

and this one!!