McBlessings!
Today we arrived back in Bloomington after our six week tour in the east. We spent the last week with our team at a cabin in Indiana. It was very refreshing to be together as a team as we begin to count down the days until we leave…and it is now official that we are leaving! We bought plane tickets for Saturday November 3rd. This was a huge but exciting step for us. With each passing month we are amazed with the ways that God is brining us closer to our goals that we need to get to New Zealand.

As you can imagine, after being gone for six weeks we came home to a lot of mail. We had a package from Robert O’Brien, a high school student from the South Fork youth group, the church that we used to serve at. He had sent us a letter on behalf of the youth group explaining the gift that was in the package. The South Fork youth group recently went to CIY (Christ in Youth conference) in southern Illinois. At this conference there is a student center where the kids eat for the week. They have an allotted amount of money on a meal card and it does not carry over. Something we started doing a few years ago was buying McDonalds gift cards with our left-over money each day. Robert wrote us a note telling us that they were thinking of us while they were at CIY:
“On Monday night of CIY, I thought about it, and I remembered what we did last year. So after every night, I took all of our cards and went to McDonalds. We definitely had a lot of fun and everyone agrees that you will really like it. Enclosed with this letter is $83 worth of McDonald’s gift cards!”
Wow! $83 of McDonalds gift cards. This was such a blessing to us for a couple of reasons. First of all, as you know, we have been traveling around the country this summer and we are not done yet. These gift cards will be awesome to have while we are on the road and stop for food. That’s worth, like, 83 McChickens! Also, we were so blessed that the kids were thinking about us every day! Their understanding of partnership amazes us! We were so encouraged by the thoughtfulness of the kids. We are continually reminded of the blessing that South Fork was to us and thankful for the blessing that it still is!