you have lead me
to the sadness
i have carried this pain
on a back bruised,
nearly broken
im crying out to you

i will sing of your mercy
that leads me through valleys of sorrow
to rivers of joy

- The Valley Song, Jars of Clay

You know how I said the wind was so strong the other day? Well it was strong enough to blow over a fence in the backyard!

I found some nice flowers outside:

There’s a cool tree out back that is covered in these - not all have budded, but I did find one flower stalk that had. Pretty soon the tree will be covered in these strange pink flowers.

This one is my new favorite.. and my new background screen!

To see even more pictures of my new apartment/backyard, see the whole set of pictures on my flickr page. (I made some pictures of my house private, just email me if you want to see them and can’t.)

Here’s a few things going on this week with me:

• I’m finishing up a prayer/update letter, to be sent out pretty soon, with real printed copies even! If you want one by snail-mail or email and I don’t have your address, let me know soon. You’re going to want to read this one, it has some pretty important updates in it about me. I can’t say what yet, you’ll just have to wait and read it. (Also, I will not be posting it online. Sorry.)
• I am getting back into my Arabic Bible Readings project, put in some hours on that today. Trying to get organized about which stories I will tackle first, and tomorrow I believe I will get some more scenery video from the footage tapes and stick that on my hard drive to work with.
• Speaking of hard drives, I have also transferred all of my current working footage for the Bible Readings project onto the external Western Digital drive I brought back from the States to use for just that purpose. Now my laptop hard drive space has significantly more free space!!
• Work Team: This week we have a work team here on MMC property, helping “beautify the buildings and grounds” (in Larry’s words)(Larry is the maintenance man). They are a team of 5, working with Larry to help on painting projects, fix some of the uneven spots in the grassy area (they will be planting grass seed tomorrow to cover over the spots that have been filled in), as well as doing some other improvements that I don’t know how to describe. The entry gate was painted a new coat of black yesterday, it looks so much nicer now! And some of the outside walls are shining a brilliantly brighter shade of white than they were before.
• Jamie, Brandon, Beth, Ripley and Briana are all in Morocco this week, but should be back on Friday. They were planning to be gone for eight days, although Brandon and Jamie were thinking of staying longer.

That’s all I can think of for now, hope everyone else has a great week!

It is SO windy today!

I’ve discovered that wind is great for things like laundry, not so great for things like taking close up pictures of flowers.

If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.

2 Timothy 2:13