A Full Season

The last four months have felt like a whirlwind! April and May we spent wrapping up the school year and leadership with our Teach With Cru team. At the end of April, we led a debrief in which we helped the team begin to process through their past year and look toward what God has for them in this next year. It was a very fruitful time. All of the members of our intern team will be returning to Chiang Mai after the summer break, but one has now completed her two-year internship and will no longer be directly a part of Cru; one has been promoted into a director role at GIS while her husband will be more involved with TWC training for the incoming interns; and the other two interns are heading into their second year.

Additionally, this coming school year, we have four new interns joining our TWC team; Nick and I will no longer be a direct part of the intern team but will remain part of the greater TWC staff team, and two of our staff team members have moved back to the USA. There is certainly a lot of transition within the scope of our team, and we wanted to make sure we created space to begin working through that. We are grateful for the last two years we spent as team leaders and for the opportunities we had to invest in the interns directly, and we are also looking forward to a bit of a different pace without the leadership component on our plates. We had our final All Staff TWC dinner in May before people went their separate ways for the summer.

In addition to our regular ministry, we also spent a great deal of time prepping for our two months of “home assignment.” This involved scheduling events, meals, and appointments with friends, family, and supporters, preparing goodie bags and materials for those events, and making detailed lists of the items we would need to restock—things that we cannot readily purchase in Thailand. It seemed like every spare minute was used toward this preparation, but planning on the front end made for a much smoother time in the US and helped us maximize our time the best we could.

Rest in the USA

Returning to the USA this summer, we were already feeling rather exhausted. Nick and I both felt like we were constantly in “go” mode this last semester and had very little “rest” and recovery time, even on school breaks. Knowing that, we felt like the Lord gave us a lot of peace to treat this home assignment more as a time of rest and connection for our family. We are so grateful for the many people we did get to see and connect with, for the opportunities to worship with all three campuses of our home church in Northern Kentucky, and for the time to rest and “play” as a family and slow down with the Lord. We have been truly blessed by this summer break and feel refreshed and recharged to return to the field and dive back into ministry. Thank you for all of your prayers and encouragement throughout this summer.

Additional Highlights