"Family" Goodbye

Saturday afternoon we had the first fall team meeting. The purpose was to welcome two new families to our team and to say goodbye to ours. It was something we were both looking forward to and dreading at the same time! Our team here has become family to us in many ways, it's hard to be moving in a new direction after spending 6 1/2 years walking the same direction with them.
Their gift to us is one we'll put in a special place wherever we end up next. It's a bench and on the back of it, everyone burned their names into it. It turned out very cool and we're excited to find a special place for it. They also had special gifts for the kids...great little things for the airplane ride! Meagan Jackson presented them to the kids. One of the gifts was a toy phone filled with candy and she said "it's because they still want to hear from them and to know how they're doing...because they'll always be JV Kids." Totally made me cry!On the other hand...it was fun to welcome Hondo & Trisha Wynn, even though they've been here for about 2 months now and Brad & Laurel Jenkins who recently arrived in Slovenia. The Jenkins will be living in Maribor, working with Andrej & Nina, developing a youth ministry there after spending their first year here in Ljubljana, learning as much Slovene as they can. Both families have young boys, Caleb Wynn is about 2 months younger than Elijah and Landon Jenkins is just a couple months younger than Abigail. It's amazing to see the team picture and all those little JVers in the group!
Saturday's get-together was something that I knew was going to be hard to get through. We love all these people so much! During the sharing time, they showered us with encouraging words about how we've grown and changed and how God has used us. It gives us hope for where the Lord is taking us next...knowing there is still more to experience in all those areas!Oh...and just a note about Saturday morning...we had a garage sale to pass on all the things we weren't taking back in the container with us. After about three weeks of no rain...it thunderstormed that morning! We had a plastic baby bathtub outside and the next day it had over 4 inches of rain in it!! We were able to sell many of our things, despite the thunder, lightening and rain and were able to pass on almost all the rest.