brandonandkatie.com

Today is Katie’s 27th birthday. I couldn’t be more happy to have her in my life than I am right now. I am so thankful that she was born and am eternally grateful for the life she’s chosen to live with me. So, dear wife, today I wanted to share 27 things I love about you. To everyone else, please feel free to add your own in the comments!

We drove up to Coffeyville late Saturday afternoon and got to spend about an hour visiting with the elder over missions and his wife, and then around six most of the elders and their wives, and the deacons and their wives (plus the minister and his family) showed up for dinner. We met a lot of new people and got to tell them all briefly about the work we want to do in Kharkov.

Today Katie and I are off to Coffeyville, Kansas to meet with a church about a possible support partnership. We’re meeting with the missions committee tonight, and then I’ll be making a presentation and preaching in the morning. We are excited to meet another church family, and we are very excited that the drive is only an hour and a half from here.

This coming weekend I’ll be preaching in Coffeyville, Kansas as Katie and I continue to look for more financial partners to make our work in Ukraine a reality. Katie suggested I preach on something similar to a class I had taught during our year in Ukraine back in 2008. It sounded like a good idea, and so yesterday morning before we headed to the building, I was going to upload those files from home so I could access them from the office. But I couldn’t find the files anywhere on my computer.

A confession: I’ve been hearing about this book Blue Like Jazz for years now, and I’ve been told on a occasion that I would really enjoy it. And it’s not at all that I didn’t believe those people who recommended it, it’s just that I really didn’t like the title or the cover. Even though that’s not supposed to matter, it really does. I don’t like jazz music much at all, and the cover looked too much like the title for me to really want to make the commitment to read it.

We have been in Broken Arrow for over a week now, and almost every day I’ve told myself I need to sit down and write about what’s been going on. And now here I am, ten days later with way too much to say. In short, let me say this: Things are going really well.

Father Fiction is a book written by a man who grew up without a father, and about all the life lessons and truths he missed out on because of it. He opens up the heart and mind of a boy with no father, and his free-flowing candor makes the journey feel as natural as a conversation with a friend. As he writes, he also teaches, and it is inspiring. And in more ways than one, I related to the things he had to say

Today has been moving too fast to realize that everything about our life has changed. We are here for the night in Lockney, Texas. Everything we own is either in our van or the U-Haul trailer behind Glenn’s truck. Until we pull into Broken Arrow tomorrow afternoon we have no home.