Shifting Gears

Moving from the regular school year to the summer represents a huge change of activity for us. During the school year the large majority of my time is spent preparing and teaching classes. Now that the school year is over our life becomes very different! Now most of our time is focused on our mission church. We are currently in a building program at the mission which means daily visits to the construction site and a lot of running around to buy materials, get windows and doors made, and trying to find spare (second-hand) supplies like fans, lights, etc. We're also building benches for our children's classes & clubs. Needless to say, we're feeling a bit out of our league in all of this (church construction coordination and bench-building were not electives offered in my seminary Ph.D. program), but we're having a great time and are finding it all very rewarding! In addition to the construction project, we're enjoying having more time to make pastoral visits and to plan church activities (like a youth outing, a church picnic, etc.) than we usually have.