God's grace

Everyday is a lesson on God's grace. I often miss it. I'll let a day go by without really cluing into how His grace shaped my day. And then every so often something big comes along and suddenly I'm awakened once again to how gracious He really is.

We're at a point now where we need to hold off on any more trips to Ireland until we get more money raised. At first, when we were faced with it, I was pretty bummed. Ireland is where we are supposed to be and every time we go the connection grows stronger, so the thought of staying away for a longer time than usual pained us.

But here's the thing. What is really needed is for us to get moved to Ireland full time. In order to do that we need to have a certain amount coming in every month and have a certain sum in our account to cover all the costs of relocating. So God's grace has come through by helping us to focus our attention more acutely on that goal.

And His grace will see us through as we continue the climb up Mt. Fundraising. We shall reach the summit and what a view it will be!

There and Back Again

We've now been back in the States for a couple of weeks. We are sooo ready to actually be in Ireland full time. This backing and forthing is growing tiring.

So one thing I'm really bummed about is the fact that we have very few photos from our events from this, our most recent trip. With the best intentions I always had my camera with me, ready to hand it off to someone who could snap a few images during the workshop. Or if we were meeting with someone, to set up my little tripod and get some shots.

However, my intentions seldom played out and I would remember about the time we were packing up.

Oy.

Internet!

Sorry again for being incommunicado over the last while.

I find that as these trips progress, and especially if we are traveling (as we were last week) it gets harder and harder to keep up with all that we're doing. Since we didn't have reliable access to the Internet for about a week while we were "down country", I didn't get any blogging done and then, as with other trips, by the time we're back to Dublin, there is so much to tell that it is overwhelming to try and recap it all.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

We finished up in Cork in good order, having met with contacts, old and new, as well as conducting our workshop at Grace, which went very well. Michael O'Donovan, the Worship Pastor has asked us to come back again and do an intensive with their key worship leaders.

Our new contacts made in County Kerry were very worthwhile. We met with the key leader of Listowel Christian Fellowship and an American missionary who works with him. It seems that they are at a crucial point in their church's development wherein they need some help in the area of worship. We plan to return on our next trip to see what we can do in that endeavor. We also met with another leader from that same fellowship who in full-time ministry. He divides his time between several concerns, including, among other things, Focus-on-the-Family, Evangelical Alliance Ireland (EAI) and the church in Listowel. I think he will pan out to be a strategic contact to have.

We returned to Dublin on Friday. Since then we led worship at City Gates Church and have had "bits and pieces" of business and personal things that demanded our attention.

Today we drove up to Dundalk (about half-way to Belfast) to meet David Porter, who we were with the first weekend here, to discuss ongoing issues being faced in the area of worship at his church.

We have meetings the next couple of days and then a rather comprehensive workshop with worship team members from the three Trinity congregations in Dublin.

Then it's back to Florida (and the heat - yuck) on Monday.

I'll be sharing some of my impressions, reflections, ruminations, etc. over the next while, so stay tuned...