What a gang of beautiful children!   

This was at our summer home, Orchard Lake Campground in the mountains of Saluda, NC.

New baby Rayma Life Aug 4th

Baby Rayma and Mom are doing great!

Our Family Hero

For those of you that don't know, this is Otto Koning.  He and his family served in Papua, Indonesia for many years.  He is well known for his Pineapple story and many other messages that have inspired us in more ways that we can mention right here.  Jeff and the girls were able to visit him in his home and knew that they had met a real-life hero.

Happy Letter

We are happy to announce that we received a letter from Pioneers International inviting us to come to their orientation in December.  This is a week long event held in Orlando, FL (their US base) where we get to know each other in person.  We we be in lectures for many days and I believe that there is a total of 6 hours of personal counseling/evaluation for Jeff and myself.  This is probably to make sure that we are who we have said we are and to see if we are indeed ready for foreign soil.  We also received a folder full of other evaluations to fill out.  Praise the LORD!

Good Counsel

If you have known the Youngs for any amount of time you might discover that we are not naturally inclined to go slowly.  Some people just seem to know how to walk through life at a steady pace, where as we seem prone to run.  We are slowing down in our "old age" and realizing that running ahead (especially of God's timing) doesn't get you where you want to go any faster.  So here we are thinking that we were taking things slowly - I mean we had looked into agencies for over a year - talk about slow in Youngsville, but God is so good to continue to hem us in.  Our recent hemming came from our church.  The elders and deacons met with us on Father's Day and after asking us many questions and listening very well (and long) gave us some very good counsel.  They asked us to wait until December (instead of July) to go to the orientation with Pioneers (if we get invited) and to put our house up for sale.  So we are happy to be hemmed.

Filling Out Our Application

We spent much of June filling out our application to Pioneers International.  This was the second, more in depth, application.  We also needed pastors' references and 6 personal references each!  I didn't think we knew 12 people that personally! :)  It was a funny turn of feelings for us as we spent so much time evaluating agencies and being cautious about jumping into any one before we were sure we had "sniffed them out" enough - that now we were just really hoping that THEY liked US enough after "sniffing us out" to invite us to their orientation.  We shall wait and see...

Who to Choose?

Many of you know of our struggle to know the best way to go. The choice at one point was between a small, new Bible translation agency and a larger agency without a specific Bible translation emphasis.  After much prayer and deliberation we have decided to apply with Pioneers, International.  “Pioneers” is a larger agency that allows for many different kinds of folks and ministry giftings to function under their umbrella of authority and vision of bringing the Gospel to the unreached.  They have served in Indonesia for many years and have contacts that can help our family become more easily established once on the field.  They seem to have many resources that will help us minister to the unengaged people group we have on learned about that needs the Bible in their own language.