Whew!  The holidays are over!  I always really enjoy Christmas and New Years, but they are BUSY.  It’s strange to think that we had once planned to be packed up and living in someone’s basement by now, with our belongings sailing across the sea to Japan.  This has not yet come to pass.

Family update:  With all the unknowns at our doorstep, we are doing well.  We’ve made a sort of New Year’s resolution to get up in the morning.  Jones sleeps till 8 or 8:30 (Thank you, LORD!), and it’s all too easy to wait for his playful babbling to wake us up.  We felt like we were wasting precious time that God had given us by blessing us with a baby who sleeps late.  SO, we set the alarm for 6:30, snuggle in bed for a bit, and then one of us goes down to start the coffee.  We either read to ourselves, talk with each other about administrative stuff for the day, or pray.  It’s been lovely — and very good for our souls.  Every once in a while, we look at each other and grin, with one of us saying, “Someday, we’ll get there.  We’re going to live in Japan!”

Funding update:  We are currently 92% of our monthly budget (hooray!) and about 36% of our one-time.  In order to buy tickets and pay for shipping, our one-time needs to be about 85% — in total we have $26,000 left to raise.  Yep, it seems like a really big number to me, too.  We must be 100% of both in order to board the plane, which is a good policy.  So we will be here until that happens!  We’ve moved our date back a few weeks and hope to leave in early February, but much of this “planning” is rather fluid.  Good for my husband, bad for his planning wife. :)

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