House Beautiful.

2017 has come and gone, and we have yet to move into the house, but we are so very close! Every day of our children’s Christmas break they worked super hard to help us install the flooring, and it was finished the first day that they went back to school! Our kids are awesome. After the flooring was completed, we began to install the molding and doorframes, and install the electrical fixtures. Next are the plumbing fixtures and the air-conditioning registers – we’re so close!

Vann is feeling the pressure to be finished and to move on to other projects, and to focus on maintenance of the base again. We’ve had our noses to the grindstone so to speak working overtime to finish this mission house. We haven’t even cut the grass in over a month! The horses have been allowed to roam free in the yard area, helping keep things beat down, but it’s still pretty rough looking. There are fences and cars to be repaired, the garage and shed need organizing and deep cleaning, but soon! We’ll get to it all again soon. We really just need several clones of Vann, then we could get all kinds of things done! It's all in God’s timing. He knows what He has called us to, and He knows that there’s only one of us.

December brought my mother back down to visit us and help us survive these next few months! She is such a trooper, sleeping on the floor in the living room corner of our one room apartment, and doing all of our dishes and laundry. Lord willing she will be with us through April.

Our beautiful Corynn turned fifteen! She is just as beautiful on the inside with a sincere love for God and others that is remarkable to witness. She is excelling in her freshman year of high school, and enjoying her time with her friends.

We were privileged to host the Petra Pool’s first baptism! It was a precious baptism/birthday party for a ten-year-old missionary kid, who also happens to be our neighbor! What a sweet blessing to witness his earthly father baptizing him into the family of God in our pool!

After fifteen years, the paperwork for our property title is finally finished! That was a stressful, long struggle, but such is life in Peru. We are so very grateful to be in this beautiful place, surrounded by other missions as neighbors, and building this mission base to serve missionaries for many years to come!

A missionary friend’s visitor came to meet us recently, and as she saw the house and pool, and heard our vision, she made an analogy that was so accurate, and so profoundly spoke to me that I have to share it with you. She said, “This place reminds me of House Beautiful from Pilgrim’s Progress, the house on a hill that the Lord built for the care and refreshment of His saints”. She just hit the nail right on the head! This house is built on a hill, the Lord is the one who is building it, and one of its main uses will be the care and refreshment of the missionary community. The house in the story was built on top of the hill called “Difficulty”, which I find allegorically similar. This journey as missionaries so often feels like a difficult, uphill climb, and the need to periodically rest and be cared for is a real one.  I am just so excited to get to live in this beautiful house and use it for the Kingdom work to which we’ve been called, and for the glory of His great name!

“House Beautiful - The house on a hill that the Lord built for the care and refreshment of His saints.” –Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan