While we intended to blog sooner, we find ourselves on the eve of leaving Kansas to head for Fairbanks, Alaska.
So, goodbye yellow brick road. What an incredible two years it has been living in a small town in Kansas. This is the community where we began married life together after returnig from our honeymoon in August of 2008, and it has been an incredible place of challenge and growth for us both.
We are very excited about our journey to the last frontier, and are eager to get on the road tomorrow morning. We wil be journeying west to Colby to have coffee with some of our good friends, and then northward to Badlands National Park, where we will spend the entire next day exploring its alien landscape.
Even as we are excited to begin our new adventure, we are very humbled by the tragic death of a high school student in the local swimming pool this afternoon. This last minute occurence has been a sobering reminder of the frequent pattern of adolescent death in our community, a pattern we have worked very hard to interrupt, but one which still requires our prayers and community-wide heart change.
So, humbled, anxious, excited, and otherwise in a whirlwind of emotions, here we go, embarking on a 4,000 mile journey to the Great Land, us and our dog...can't wait...
