October Prayer requests

We may be back from Ghana, but it seems like we are still traveling quite a bit!   Since our last prayer update, we took off to the mountains for a few days with our kids when Jordan came home from South Korea for a week, and last week John attended a Short Term Missions conference in Atlanta with our new supervisor, Mike Burtnett.  Now we are finalizing our plans to go and visit some of our supporters in Northern California, Oregon and Washington.  After that, I hope to stay in one place for longer than 4 weeks in a row! 8-)   We may be in our 50's now, but it doesn't seem to be slowing us down yet!

Soooooo..prayer requests for October include:

• For our travel to visit our supporters; that we would be an encouragement to those who are such an encouragement to us
• Yesterday morning John, Norm and I had a phone conference with George and Doris, who lead one of our teams this year.  (They are the second Discovery team to include nationals as well as ex-pats on their team.)  As we discussed next years trips, they proposed having a ratio of 2 ex-pats to each national on their team.  When I asked why, they said they would much rather have a 1 to 1 ratio, but because of funding realities, they figured that was the best that could be done.  We have struggled with this reality on the Ghana trip as well, and see this as an important issue that is not going away as we continue integrating Vision 20/25 on Discovery trips  We don't know what the solution is, so your prayers would be really appreciated.
• I have a small health concern: my right eye developed an infection several times while in Ghana, and I thought I had left it all behind me until it happened again on our way home from the mountains two weeks ago.  I saw my eye Dr yesterday, who has put me my third eye antibiotic since this all began, but it's possible this recalcitrant infection (as he called it) could come back again.  I would appreciate your prayers about this (have I grown enough through this trial to put it behind me yet Lord?)

Updates from last month:

• John has accepted the four participants for the trip to South America the beginning of 2007.  Thanks for your prayers!
• Approvals are still needed for a couple of the proposed 2007 Discovery trips; that these would come through soon so we can get them on the web.
• We still need more Discovery trip planners to join us on staff so we can offer more trips, thereby recruiting more people to join in the work.

Did you get a chance to check out the video footage on our blog yet?  Also, one of our Ghanaian discovery participants this year, who wants to join the Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation has started her own blog as she seeks partners to enable her to do this.  We think she's done a great job; you might want to check it out at: http://www.meinkoom.blogspot.com/

Thanks so much for your prayers!  We really need and appreciate them!

In His service;

Shevawn


"Divert daily - withdraw weekly - abandon annually.  That's the secret to lasting."       -Rick Warren