request

Tests!

Dear friends!

Finally, warmer weather is here. I hope you are as glad about it as my family and I are. It was a long cold winter.

This content has been restricted to logged-in users only. Please login to view this content.

Much has happened, so here is a brief synopsis: We have narrowed down our initial location in France to be… Caen, in Normandy. We will be studying French at the university there, and the kids will be attending local school. We are in the stage of needing to pay tuition, after which the university can send us papers which we use to then apply for a long-term French visa. We are excited, and nervous.

Please pray as we try to find an apartment or house online. We may need to go through a housing agency to do this. We are hoping to find something near both the university and the school Liberty and Van will attend.

More to come!

Funeral

It is with sadness we announce that Michelle’s paternal grandmother passed away in her sleep Thursday at 10 pm, Oct 16, 2015.

We will be driving down to Jacksonville, TX, for the funeral, and to be with family during this sad time. Michelle’s brother and his wife live near Jacksonville, but her sister Melissa had to fly in from Thailand.

We expect to take 2 days to drive down, the funeral is Tuesday, we will stay a few more days, then depart to drive back to Hamilton.

Please pray for safety.

Refund, and waiting

Yesterday in a Canadian Supercentre we saw children’s’ winter boots for sale. That made Michelle and I pause and look at each other, both thinking the same thing: We did not expect to be in Canada in Sept/Oct! We actually began leaving way back in June when we went to Texas to visit Michelle’s family. That visit was even cut short a little bit so that we could visit my bro-in-law in North Vancouver in order to be back in Ontario for Aug so that we could be ready to apply for the visas. Then the Great Wait began.

We do keep hearing from one school official who, as far as his emails communicate, is still expecting us any day. But it is the other school official upon whom we wait. Please keep praying that whatever the hold-up is will be cleared up. To be honest we wonder if the number of all our years has finally caught up to us, and some official somewhere said, “Hey, this guy came here in 1997. This lady came here in 1999. No more visas for them!”

But EVEN if that is the case, God can move this mountain. We know there are more people who need to hear, more places that still haven’t heard. So keep praying.

On a different note, we cancelled our plane tickets since the prospect of guessing a wrong departure date seemed too likely. The airline, Hainan Air, has been very helpful throughout, despite horrendous reviews I’ve found online about them. We’ve flown Hainan Air several times and always had a good experience. Well, in this case the refund they gave us is almost 3/4 of what we’ve already paid. My worse-case expectation was that we would only get back 1/4 of what we paid.

noun_plane-ticket_128214

QUICK UPDATE

Your prayers are being heard!

To be more precise, our Invitation Letter is not here yet. But what is new is an email from the official preparing our Letter. Not receiving any communication from the school has left us wondering what is going on. Well, the official wrote Sunday night telling us that there have been rule changes, and that it is more complicated to get the Invitation Letter approved. But, she assured us she is working on it. She even told us our apartment has been ready for us since August. She also said that the invitation Letter would not be ready before October.

This means we need to change our plane tickets, again. We are flying Hainan Air, and they have a straightforward policy for rebooking flights, so we are thankful for that. But the official still has not given us a date for which we can prepare.

Please pray with us for some clarity from the school about when we can expect to leave Canada/arrive in China. We really do not want to pick another date and then find out from the school that we guessed wrong. (As an aside, we bought these tickets a long time ago due to incredibly low prices, as well as with the assumption that surely everything would be ready within 3 months. By rebooking twice now we are actually still paying less than if we had not bought any tickets until now. But if we have to rebook a third time, then it will cost more).

To recap: We were due to leave August 20th, but we had to rebook because the official did not have the Letter ready.

We then were scheduled to leave this Sunday, September 20, having thought that the Letter would be ready within a month, but it is not and we are now delayed again.

We do not know what new date to schedule for our departure! It will not be until October sometime.

Waiting for papers

We finally have some concrete news! The person in charge of arranging for our paperwork which we need to use to apply for the visas was on holiday in Kazakstan. We are feeling relieved as we wondered if we were getting a Central Asia “no”: It is cultural to not say “no” directly. Instead, nothing happens and you are supposed to get the hint.

We expect to hear directly from this person in the next week and can them, hopefully, have a clearer idea about the next aimed-for departure date. Thank you for praying with us about this!