Some good news and some bad news

It has been neat to see the way the Lord has provided in the last few week! Right now we are $500 short of being completely funded. All the means is that 1 person needs to give $21 dollars a month for our term. We are blown away by the faithfulness of our Lord and the love and support of our family and friends. Thank you so much for your support and prayers over the past 6 months. We have been learning so much. We have 2 more church visits scheduled then we are done with our home ministries. That is pretty exciting :) We are heading to Stephens City, Va next weekend and Indianapolis the weekend of March 6. This is the good news :)

The not so good news...We called the Australian Embassy the other day to see if we could check on the status of our visa. Agatha, our Embassy friend that Sean has talked to a few times, said that once our sponsorship and nomination are approved it's an average of 2-3 months longer. Unfortunately, we do not have word that our sponsorship is approved. Let me explain a little more about our visa in case you are confused. We are applying for a 2-year religious workers visa. In order to get this, the National Superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Australia has to send in an application saying that we are going to be working for them and that they will "sponsor" us during our 2 years there. Also, our church in Yeppoon has nominate us for a position in the church. This is the paperwork that we are waiting on in order for our visa to then be processed.

So it seems like we will be around a bit longer. As anxious are we are to get to Australia, we are excited about spending more time with friends and family. We have 3 family weddings in the next few months so we're hoping to be able to attend some of those now, as well as see some new babies :) Congrats to Courtney and Darren Chilson with their baby boy yesterday :) We're sad that we are going to arrive in the middle of the ministry year in Australia but we know that we will be getting there exactly when the Lord wants us to. So until then....we wait and enjoy where the Lord has us now.