The Thin Edge

It's official. I'm on my way to Atlanta in just seven days! Hopefully, my non-stop Delta flight from London will get me there next Saturday afternoon, where I'll pick up an Alamo rental car and drive to Birmingham that evening. My dad and two of my sisters live there, and it's been sixteen months since we have seen each other. Every time I see my father, I realize it could be our last visit on this earth and it's always a bittersweet affair, because he's getting older and more frail as time goes along. When we left home for the UK nearly four years ago, I never dreamed my mom would become critically ill with spinal meningitis only eighteen months later and die after two weeks in a coma. None of us got to say our goodbyes: it happened so suddenly and unexpectedly. So every trip gets more precious to me now.

Sometime Monday, 3 March, I will head towards Little Rock to see my daughter and her family: three precious grandchildren that my wife visited recently (yeah, this year we've had to make separate trips). The youngest of my three grandchildren will not even recognize me, mainly because he was two weeks old when we first met—you guessed it, sixteen months ago. My granddaughter is three and my oldest grandson just turned five. We're convinced that grandchildren are the greatest threat to missionaries remaining on the mission field! It's so difficult to see them once a year and, in our case, it's been quite a bit longer than that. My son-in-law is an avionics technician on the C-130 Hercules; and getting a chance to live on an Air Force base, even for a couple of days, reminds me of another wonderful chapter in my life. I love the buzz of activity and the smell of jet fuel at Little Rock Air Force Base: the only C-130 training base in the free world where all four branches of the U.S. military and that of twenty-seven allied nations are trained on this workhorse of the skies.

On Friday morning, 7 March, it will be time to return to Atlanta, see a couple of old friends over the weekend, including John Jenkins and Aaron Turner. I'm also going to meet my new friend and fellow blogger, Ben Gray, for dinner on Monday, 10 March, somewhere in the Fayetteville area. If anyone else lives in or near Atlanta, please let me know. Maybe we could meet for coffee or lunch. From March 12th through the 15th, I've been invited to participate in a series of planning sessions for a summer mission team in the Atlanta area. They began bringing a large team to the valleys of South Wales several years ago, and our church has recently become involved in the project.

Of course, no visit to Atlanta would be complete without spending several hours in the Apple Store at Lenox Square. Hoping to check out the new MacBook Air (it arrived in this store today), sit in on a seminar or two, upgrade to iWork '08, iLife '08, the new Microsoft Office 2008, and anything else that I might be able to fit into my suitcases for the return flight home on 17 March…maybe a Mac mini to replace the Windows PC that just bit the dust. Wait, the Air only weighs three pounds! Good thing there's a 50-pound weight limit per suitcase.

For our stateside ministry partners scattered across the southeastern states, I am hoping to visit most of you in late May or early June this year. My wife and I are returning in mid-May for the birth of our fourth grandchild in Pensacola; and I plan to extend my trip to make the rounds, even if I cannot be with everyone on a Sunday. Thanks for continuing to pray for us and share in our work of making the Gospel known here in the United Kingdom. If others would like to partner with us, please visit our ministry website for more details on how to do that.