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.

It wasn’t until I finished reading Father Fiction a couple of weeks ago that I was delightfully introduced to Donald Miller’s writing. (A book, ironically enough, that I picked up off the bookshelf because both the cover and the title intrigued me.) I enjoyed his writing and his thoughts very much, and I wanted more. So last Monday Katie and I went down to the used book store and found a copy, and by Saturday—six days later—I finished 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.

A couple days ago I finished reading Father Fiction: Chapters For A Fatherless Generation by Donald Miller.

You need to read this book.

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.

The gist of the book centered around the idea that every boy learns what it means to be a man from having a dad in his life, and so if you didn’t have one around, you grew up misinformed and unsure about important areas of life. What’s interesting to me is how this book isn’t limited to those boys who didn’t have dads. This book is for girls too, and for kids who had dads but they were extremely flawed men.

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.

So it hit us on Saturday that we are actually doing this. I’m not exactly sure what caused it, but I’m thinking it was the combination of watching Andy drive away to college at the theater and then loading up and sending off the stuff we’ll be storing at our friends’ house for the next five years. Whatever it was, Katie and I were both feeling it and were both pretty emotional about it. Even though we haven’t lived in Lubbock for the last nine years, we have called Lubbock home for most of that time; it’s been that place we always come back to, and so it’s always felt like home.