Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Wow, it's been an incredible week! We arrived in Manila Tuesday evening, happy to be finished packing up our house and excited to be heading back to Canada next week. I can hardly believe that in just 1 week we'll be with family and friends in Manitoba! Wow!

We had a great meeting with our field chairman yesterday as we discussed what God has been doing here in the Philippines. We also talked a bit about the future of the flight program and where God is leading. It was an encouraging time together.

Here in Manila we have a short list of things we want to do-- check around the city for some warmer clothes (can Kaleb arrive in Winnipeg in sandals or does he need a pair of tennis shoes?!), see our new NTMA families who are currently studying language, and do coffee with some other friends. Garry is also finishing up a bit of flgiht program paperwork and Kevin needs to go to immigration to be fingerprinted on Monday.

During our last week in Puerto we spent a bit of time with different people... with Norm and Jacque, for whom we provided flight service until they moved to town earlier this year; with Kevin's badminton trainer and his girlfriend; with Kevin's badminton team; with Ben and Suzy, our co-workers who are now running the Palawan flight program; with different foreigners that live in town and do various ministries; with the men who have invested in Kevin and taught him much about agriculture; and with the folks at Aloha orphanage. Many of our badminton friends do not know the Lord and our prayers are much with them, that God would be working in their hearts and that they would come to know Him. Though our times together were good they were also sad as we said our goodbyes and realized that another chapter of our lives is finished.

At the same time, we are excited to head back to Canada and catch up with so many of you. We are excited to see what God has in store for the next months!

3 comments:

Jen said...

Get shoes for the boys. You are going to FREEZE when you get off the plane! So excited for you guys to be with family and friends soon. Hope your last days in Manila aren't TOO crazy!

donaldfast said...

Snow's not that deep yet, and no doubt your sons are 'boys', so they'd probably do fine in sandals, besides, you can always wear socks in sandals! (seriously though, shoes might be more desirable). Travel safe. Looking forward to seeing you.

Garry and Cynthia Barkman said...

we ended up with some tennis shoes-- yeah! thankfully we found some his size that are decent and he was quite thankful for them:). though he's mostly wearing boots now-- both he and Kevin are finding the snow to be very fun, though they don't handle the cold for very long!