While I was gone the family was busy not just with visas but with preparations for Christmas. We were ecstatic to find out (back in September!) that Christmas decorations (including artificial Christmas trees) could be purchased in Medan. The kids were particularly excited to make the place feel a bit more festive for the Advent/Christmas… Continue reading Christmas in the Tropics
Category: Current Events
Prayers for Earthquake Victims
About 1:21 pm (local time) a 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck the island of Java in the central western region, a bit south and east of the capital city of Jakarta. The epicenter of Cianjur has suffered destroyed and damaged buildings, and there are an estimated several dozen dead and many more injured. This is not… Continue reading Prayers for Earthquake Victims
Healthy & Planning
We’re all past whatever ailments dragged us down for a week or more. Thank you for your prayers! We were also able to get our wall repainted, the electrical outlet checked out, a new gas cannister and a newer, heavier-duty regulator and we’re back in action kitchen-wise as well. We’re in our third of four… Continue reading Healthy & Planning
A Difficult Weekend
Hot on the heels of a great time with friends visiting last week was a pair of national disasters. The first occurred about 2:30am in the morning, Saturday. Centered to the south of us a considerable distance, an earthquake rated about a 6 on the Richter scale struck. Thankfully there was only one fatality and… Continue reading A Difficult Weekend
Our First Visitors!
Outside the visit of our Regional Director and another Office of International Mission (OIM) worker back in May (which was lovely, to be sure!) we haven’t had any visitors until this past week. But we were blessed this week to be visited by the Cima family. The Cimas work with church partners in Cambodia. They’ve… Continue reading Our First Visitors!
A Visit Home
This summer LCMS teens from around the country will gather together – as they have every three years for nearly 40 years – for the National Youth Gathering. What’s different about this one is that for the first time (as I understand it) a scholarship is available to enable families serving the church overseas to… Continue reading A Visit Home
More Guests
Overlapping Deaconess Rein’s time in country but missing actually visiting with her was Regional Director for Southeast Asia, Rev. Charles Ferry. He visited with us on his way further westward to assess the situation in Sri Lanka, which has been troublesome to say the least. Our workers there, Rev. Steven Mahlberg & family, are safe… Continue reading More Guests
Goodbye Jimmy
That’s Jimmy, our first pet in Medan. Kind of anticlimactic in many ways. We didn’t pick him out, he picked us. We rarely saw him, except when we’d inadvertently open a cabinet door he was hiding behind. We joked about the parties he would throw when we were away from the apartment, but he was… Continue reading Goodbye Jimmy
Our First Ramadan
A beautiful sunset Saturday night from the east side of Medan… Of course it’s not really our first Ramadan. Ramadan has been celebrated for over a thousand years. We heard more about it in the US over the past few years but even so it remained a very distant affair. Important to adherents of the… Continue reading Our First Ramadan
Lenten Beauty
It may at first seem counterintuitive, that in the midst of Lent we could find and enjoy beauty. But contrition and repentance are not the same thing at all as boringness or repetition or monotony or ugliness. If anything, our Lenten contemplations should drive us in part by comparison – the aching awareness of our… Continue reading Lenten Beauty
The Nelson Family Indonesia 