AWESOME NEWS!

I just wanted to let everyone know that God has yet again done the impossible. We have the money to purchase our tickets thanks to a wonderful handful of people - some of which I have never met in my life!

Thank you Ginger, Dale, Chris and Michael - you guys truly amaze us! Thank you Jo for your faithfulness and love you have shown us from DAY 1! Crystal M - thank you so much! Joan...you are such an encouragement - thank you for loving us! Thank you Robin for giving from your heart and always making us laugh! Jeannine - where have you been!? Miss you, love you! And last but not in anyway least- the people at Liberty Lighthouse that collected change for 2 weeks to help us buy our tickets!!! Thank you!! We love you and CAN'T wait to see you again! And I also want to say thank you to Dawn (John's mom) for always helping us and for always being on the other end.

We're going to purchase our tickets tommorrow - the very last day in which we had to pay it! God is never late! :) WOW! I have some other awesome news I'd like to share with you. I hope you understand what I'm about to say because it can be confusing but please stick it out to see what God has done.

John and I, on a whim, or so we thought, decided to check on how much cheaper the tickets would be if we left before Jude turned 2 years old and he sat in our lap. Eventhough, normally this idea sounds foolish since we're going to be on planes for over 24 hours and our 'almost 2 year old' can NOT keep still...but anyway, I checked on it and that moved our fly date from December to Nov. 8th because the fly date must be 9 days before the child's birthday.

So...we claimed that date and just started to believe God for the money. Today we discovered that we were late for our border run. A border run is something that we have to do to keep our visa current. We have a one year visa and to keep it current and not void we must leave the country every 3 months. Kind of like a check in. So this was our last set of 3 months and we were due to go on the 28th. Well, today it was the 30th!

And they changed the laws last year so that when you are late you pay a hefty fine of 500 baht per person - per day! So that meant 2,000baht ($62) for John and I (you don't have to pay for the children). While we're standing there going through the Thai pomp and circumstance...and paperwork...we are told that our visas are now invalid and we will be given only 30 more days in the country.

We had planned on applying for a tourist visa which would give us another 3 months in the country before being booted out...but because the visa expiration date was different from the day we had to leave the country to keep the visa valid (Oct. 28th)(if that makes any sense at all!) they would not be able to give us the 3 month extension!!!

So in plain english...if we hadn't decided to move our date up then we'd be being kicked out of the country (and face serious charges and fines) in November anyway and possibly not have the money to buy tickets because our date was set for late December! We thought we had until January to renew our visas! Anyway, I was just perfectly blessed by this...even in the seemingly small things we are taken care of.

Wow...what an awesome God we serve! So...we're officially coming home for a time! I really can't believe it! I can't wait to see all of you! Well, it's really really past my bedtime because of that late border run (which went quite badly by the way...had to go back to the Thai border 3 times while trying to get through the Malaysian border!). Goodnight everyone! I will write again soon!

Thank you for reading!