It's kind of a surreal feeling, but the car is all packed and everyone else is asleep except me just doing a few last preparations for taking the crew on the road for the next month.  To be honest, it doesn't feel much different from most of our other trips except that we know we will do laundry several more times since we'll be gone longer and if we forgot something we won't be back next week to get it. 

After church tomorrow at Saint John's Lutheran Church in Ellisville, our church home away from home (where home is these days I don't exactly know), we will depart on an approximately 5 hour journey to Wycliffe North Central in West Chicago IL where we will spend July 20 - 31.  Those days we will spend in the LBT office at a prefield session called PREPARE (which means Partnership Resource Equipping & Pre Assignment Readiness Event)  We hope to have a clearer sense of direction regarding specificis of our assignment after this event as well as new tools for when we go out to visit churches.

Speaking of visiting churches, we are excited to see an old friend from seminary, Tom Osterndorf, and his family when we have the pleasure of visiting Lord of Glory Lutheran Church in Grayslake IL on Sunday 7/27. 

On August 1st, we will leave the Chicago area for South Dakota, where Rich has several speaking dates.  We will be in South Dakota from August 1 - 17, returning to Saint Louis on the 18th of August.  While we are in South Dakota we will make the 2 hour drive from Presho (pop. 512) where we will be staying to Mount Rushmore.  We also have a couple other things planned that we will share with you by blog and newsletter as they develop.

We have been richly blessed the last week with the Lord opening up doors for us to come and share about the ministry He is giving us with LBT.  Aside from January and February which have some planning work to be done for time in Oklahoma and Texas, we are already booked somewhere every Sunday through the end of March 2009!  We look forward to seeing how God is going to work through all of this!  Thank you for joining this journey with us.  We appreciate your prayer for us and more importantly for the work of Bible translation so that all may know of Jesus as Savior and Lord.

See ya soon!