A quiet moment in chaos

I'm sitting here enjoying a quiet cup of coffee and watching the kids play outside.  It feels so strange to be doing something so normal when life is anything but normal.

Since my last post much has happened and our plans have been up in the air.  My brother-in-law was killed in a car accident at the end of April and left behind my sister and their 7 children.  We spent a week in Virginia with them hoping to be of some help, but knowing that the difficult times are still to come.  My sister is a strong woman and I have no doubt that she will rise to the challenge ahead of her.

We were home briefly, but then packed up the car and headed west.  We drove to California with minor incident (the transmission on our van burned up...literally...just east of Oklahoma City) and the children and I spent a lovely week with friends in L.A.  James spent that week in San Bernardino working with the church there in an evangelistic effort.

While in California we visited the house where my father grew up and where I lived briefly.  

 After the week in California we drove back to Oklahoma City to switch out rental cars (the van was not worth fixing- the repair cost more than the van is worth and we only need a car for two more months).

We spent the following week in Dallas while James worked at his regular job.  On Thursday of that week we drove down to Austin and spent a happy day with the Dial family.  It turned out that they had an extra van that was almost exactly like the one we left behind and they are letting us borrow it until we leave!  SO thankful for such generous friends!  I'm calling it bizzaro-van because where ours was red with a gray interior, this one is gold with a beige interior.  Almost everything else is exactly the same.


So where are we in the grand scheme of things?  My sister is planning on moving to our house at the end of July and will rent it for as long as she needs.  We will have our things packed up and shipped at that time and we'll be homeless for the next month.  Not sure yet where we'll be, but that will come in time.  We plan on flying out to South Africa on August 20 or thereabouts.  That's the general plan for now, but the last few months have taught me that anything can happen.