First Saturday of Summer

Dear family and friends,

Summer has begun! Yesterday Scott finished his fourth full year of teaching, and now we can concentrate on what lies beyond. This summer is shaping up as quite an adventure for us, as we will be traveling to Kyiv, Ukraine.

That upcoming trip serves as the inspiration for this blogpage. We will be in Kyiv for nearly six weeks, from July 7 - August 18. As such, we thought that this might be the best way for us to keep people informed ... without sending out mass e-mails to people who may, or may not be so interested in our lives!

We are not sure about the regularity of our postings, as we don't know what we will find in Kyiv, as far as internet access is concerned. But we will do our best to make our postings informative and interesting.

We are very new to this ... and to be honest, pretty new to technology in general. Last week we finally put our digital camera to use, and e-mailed our first photos over the internet. We are hopeful that we will be able to include many photos on this blogpage ... for which we know at least two sets of grandparents would be very thankful.

This trip to Ukraine is an exciting opportunity for us. Scott lived in Kyiv for nearly two years, and is looking forward to introducing this wonderful city to his wife and daughter. In some ways this is a dream trip for us, as we have been commissioned by a church in Memphis (the Highland Street Church of Christ) to do a survey trip for them. Two years ago they entered the "phase out" period of their church planting efforts in Ukraine. As they currently don't have any full-time missionaries in the country, they would like for us to visit two congregations that they helped to plant, assess the young congregation's needs, and report back to them on how they may be able to provide support, training, and encouragement to them in the future.

For those of you who are prayerful, please begin praying for us. In addition to the normal prayers for safety and traveling mercies, we would request that you pray for our schedule. As we have received little direction in this area, please pray that we will be able to arrange meetings with all those whom we need to spend time with, and further, that God will direct us to those whom will give us the most insight. We truly want to be useful this summer, and a source of encouragement to others, as well. We believe that the prayers of others on our behalf will be vital to that end. Thank you.