Great Days in May

Life is moving fast these days...hard to keep up with it sometimes.

We had our annual JV Family Bible conference nearly two weeks ago at Malenovice. What an incredible time with an incredible bunch of people. Oh how we love our team!

This conference is for our second culture missionaries and their kids, as well as child care workers for those kids (we have about 50 MK's now), special guests (like Dave's mom and dad from Denver!), and people checking out JV. There were 173 of us packed into Malenovice during the days...at night many had to sleep elsewhere (like at home, in our case!) since we don't have that many beds at the hotel. But what a great time to be together!

Dave did the main teaching for this conference and taught on personal transformation as it correlated to Saul and David from 1 Samuel. It was powerful and life changing for many.

After conference Dave's mom and dad were with us for three days and we had a great time together with them..."thanks for coming to visit Mom and Dad!"

The day that JV conference ended, Claire was off to England on a trip with her school - what an incredible opportunity to see London, Cambridge and a whole bunch of other sights that she'd only seen in the movies! It was an all night bus ride there and back, so she was pretty happy to get home and sleep in her bed when all was said and done...but also said the trip was well worth what it took to get there!

My home church, Laurelwood Baptist in Vancouver Washington, sent a wonderful group of people over to Czech to spend a week doing work around the hotel, as well as at our new office building in Frydlant. They were at our house for dinner last night - what a great time with some old and new friends! We're so thankful for their love for the Lord that spurs them on to be here to serve us in this way.

Sunday was a beautiful Mother's Day for me - how I love being mom to Tyler, Caleb and Claire! We had a wonderful day together as family that day.

Tomorrow afternoon Dave and I are off to Italy to celebrate our 20th anniversary! Our dear friend, Theresa Kerns, is here to stay with the kids while we're gone until Sunday. What a good gift from her to make this trip possible. We're looking forward to these days of reflection and refreshment together.

More on the "goings on of life" when we get back!