Graduation and the Next Step

Hello, one and all!

First, thanks again to all of you who are so faithful in interceding for us with your prayers. Jon’s health is doing much better now, he’s still a little weak but he can hide it well and do basically everything he’s used to doing.

The mission school is over now, we had our graduation bash on Monday and were commissioned to our various fields. It has been so amazing getting to know the 100+ other students in the school, hearing their testimonies and visions, and it will be equally fascinating keeping in touch with them and finding out what God does with the rest of their lives. This week has been a gradual goodbye time as each day a few more leave, some on international or local outreaches, and some back to their homes. We are going on a Mozambican outreach as well, but we haven’t left yet. It’s a cool story though, we will be going to Dondo, which is where we have been accepted to come back to as long-term missionaries. They told us that it would be an outreach option a month ago, but didn’t let anyone else know until last week, so everyone else had already decided where they were going and no one wanted to come with us. So the three of us (Jon, me, God) will be doing this outreach alone, but that really worked out better. We are totally exhausted but we were planning on taking a grueling 48-hour bus ride to get down there, but then the base pilot mentioned that he would be flying to a city 1 hour away from the base next week and offered to take us in his little plane! Jon has been wanting to fly in it ever since we got here, so we jumped at the opportunity. Not only does it save us money and saves us from the arduous journey by bus, it also gives us a nice break to catch our breath before the outreach begins as well. It wouldn’t have worked out if anyone else had signed up to go with us, so God knew what He was doing when He put our team together :-).

On our outreach we will be working with the church-based orphan care program, going to various villages, encouraging the churches, then registering the families that adopted orphans to receive help from the Dondo base. It may be what we end up doing at least part of the time when we are long-term missionaries, so that will be really neat to get a feel for our future. Please pray for us about this outreach, first pray for a safe flight down there, and once we’re there we will be traveling a lot so pray for road mercies, we have some allocated finances for the outreach so please pray for wisdom in how to spend it and bless the churches, and at some point during our time there we will need to renew our visas (again…), so pray for a cheap, easy way to get out and back into the country. It has been so cool to send out prayer requests and consistently see the answers time and time again. Keep them up!

Blessings!

~Carla and Jon Reinagel