Earlier this week, Caleb and I completed a 10 day trip back to the States together with one main objective – helping him clarify a direction for college. I am happy to report, we succeeded (to a degree) in our main goal and, as a bonus, we met several minor goals along the way – some planned and some serendipitous!One minor goal was to get Oreo and our family van back to Indiana. Oreo flew in her pink crate on Missionary Flights International’s old DC 3 …

Our fifth Easter in Haiti brought a familiar and much-loved tradition established 4 years ago – a visit from Bryan and Patti. These two got engaged on their first trip to Haiti and married soon after. But the honeymoon isn’t over yet. As far as new adventures go, we started out their week with a trip to Fort Picolet, a structure from the early 1800s along the coast just past Cap Haitien. It’s a site I’ve been wanting to visit for a long time now. John Adams, our friend and co-worker, acted as guide and Samuel and Sarah were game to…

Shortly after Christmas, I got a visit from a local pastor whom, I confess, I didn’t know very well, but he works with our church planting program, Every Community for Christ.  Pastor Israel invited me to preach at his church in Limonade on March 4th.Now, March 4th seemed like a long, long time away and there was nothing on my calendar for that day, so I said, “I’d love to!”Over the last two weeks, Pastor Israel messaged me every few days on Facebook to say, “Don’t forget about March 4th!” But when the weekend finally arrived, I found a few…

In a desperate attempt to get this blog up to date, I started to sort through my photos from our whirlwind week in Florida and quickly realized why I feel so very TIRED. It was a wonderful week and there were plenty of moments of relaxation, but we kept pretty busy most of the time.On February 1, the whole family jumped onto a Missionary Flights International plane after a few frantic days of preparing sub plans and gathering assignments for the kids to work on since we were going to be missing seven days of school.  We had been told…

December here has been a whirlwind of a month – as it most often is!  Maybe you can relate? Anyway, I thought I should post a few photos (with brief commentary) before they are completely “old news”. So, first up, a photo of the seven students who were the first ever to take the ACT on Cowman’s campus. Six of them were Cowman students while the 7th was our friend Haylie, who lives down the road at Emmaus Biblical Seminary. It will be a few weeks still before we hear how they did. We had a great visit from our friend…

Finally, (and Mrs. Love says this might be the top priority in many ways) One Day the floor of the Science Lab will be tiled.  Our sweet first graders, our principal, our secretaries, our junior and senior high students all await that One Day when tile covers their rough, concrete floors too. 

Looking for a warm and fuzzy story?About a month ago, I noticed Caleb heading out our front door with a bag of trash in one hand and a bowl of food scraps in the other. He said the scraps were for two puppies he’d discovered living in the trash pit where refuse from all the missionary homes gets dumped for periodic burning.Not the loveliest corner of Haiti: After several days, the kids were excited to report that the pup was beginning to gain strength and her skin was healing up. She was always happy to see them but never once…

With all the construction projects over the past two years, Cowman’s budget has been continually stretched to the max. We’ve done some great fundraisers and seen some generous gifts come our way in that time. Even so, we often find ourselves in the position where we are stretching dollars to barely cover concrete, steel, paint, light fixtures and labor, with precious little remaining to actually furnish the new spaces. So when my cousin Jennifer put me in contact with the Children’s Ministry Coordinator at her church back in June, with the prospect of Cowman becoming their summer VBS mission project, I…

What a week! All things considered, it was a relatively smooth start to the new school year at Cowman. Or … we’ve gotten used to chaotic school starts!Hurricane Irma threw us a curve ball the previous week and put us a bit further behind in prepping our new upstairs rooms for our Middle School and High School classes. Fortunately, we were relatively unscathed by the storm itself since the winds never grew too powerful in our area.Just enough to take out a couple of large branches: Thanks for all your prayers and support!