To each of you who has prayed for us, supported us financially, encouraged us in some way, or done some act of service to get us to this point we say, “thank you.” As we have said before, we are truly blessed to have such a great team supporting us. We may be the ones going to Croatia to work with the churches, but you are the ones who are sending us.

This has been a long journey so far. God has used this time to build our team and grow us spiritually. At the beginning we wanted this process to be much faster than it has turned out to be. Today, we can honestly say that we appreciate God’s timing. It is better than our timing would have been.

Our next step is to fly to Croatia. We are scheduled to fly out of the Eastern Iowa Regional (Cedar Rapids) Airport at 9 AM on Thursday, June 14. We are set to arrive at about 2 PM Friday in Zagreb, Croatia. That’s Lily’s birthday! We think she will always remember her 7th birthday as the day she arrived in Croatia.

God willing, we will be able to go to our apartment that first day. Our team in Croatia is currently looking for an apartment for us. We will try to settle in over the weekend and then it will be on to registering with the police station and working to finalize any paperwork that is still needed for the Croatian government. After only nine days there, Connor will attend an English Bible Sports camp that is run by Scripture Union and SEND. He will be surrounded by Croatian kids his age who want to improve their English skills.

As the summer continues, Michael will enter into formal language study. Brenda and the children will work with a language tutor and join formal language study in the fall. Learning Croatian, a Slavic language, and the culture will be our primary role for at least the first two years.

Please pray for us as we move into this new stage. We can barely imagine what it will really be like.

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