Greetings from blustery Lancaster!
What makes a place feel like home for you?
Knowing your neighbours?
Your pictures on the walls?
Knowing your way around the nearest supermarket?
Friends and family coming over?
Comfortable sofas?
We have achieved 4 out of 5 on that list, we're still thinking about where to put the pictures!
We did a trip down south to speak at Iden Green Congregational Church, one of our supporting churches, and managed to see some other folks along the way. It is always encouraging to us when we get to meet up with people who have been faithfully praying and supporting us. If you haven't seen us since we got back from Nigeria and would like to, please do get in touch, we would love to see you too! Dan has been job hunting. After a good few rejections from rather boring looking jobs, a brilliant job has come up with Wycliffe UK & Ireland. He started properly last week, working on building online training modules for staff. It is a real answer to prayer. He will be working with his granddad (Keith Robinson) who will manage the projects, (provide the content, get feedback etc) and Dan will put together and package the interactive modules. We are so thankful for this opportunity for him, it will give him a marketable skill which will look good on his CV as well as allowing him to put some money aside ready for University next year.
We have all gotten involved in an Alpha course being run by our new church here in Lancaster, Father's House. It has been a great opportunity to think through some of the fundamentals of our faith and also to chat with some people who are seeking answers to their questions as well as build relationships with others in the church. We have also been spending some time exploring what our new roles with Wycliffe/SIL will look like. Tim's role is coming together well, he will probably be working in the International Language Services (ILS) team, reporting to Ian Hollman, the director of ILS. His main role initially will be helping the ILS teams as they continue to get set up to use the project planning and tracking software known as Rev79 (Rev - seven - nine). He has experience of doing this with the teams in Nigeria and so we think it will be a great fit. I (Ali) am exploring working with the Progress Bible team. Progress Bible is an initiative to gather and share data to get the Word of God into the hands of every person. You can learn more about it here: https://progress.bible/. The current plan is for us to start these new roles in January, so at this point we are just trying to get things set up and ready for that.
If all of that wasn't enough, we were blessed by the visit of Ian and his family last week, we manage to squeeze in and feed an extra 6 people for a few days!
Thank you all so much for your prayers and support for us now as we negotiate a very different country and new roles. We still need your prayers! Praise We have a home in England now. Dan has a good gap year job. Our new job roles are coming together. Prayer Wisdom and guidance on the details of our new roles. Getting the last few house jobs completed. Finding spiritually and physically healthy rhythms for our days.
