Thankful in Tanzania

Today is Thanksgiving! Okay, so I know it’s not really, but in my mind it is. Tanzania doesn’t observe American Thanksgiving (duh), so it’s a normal workday for everyone. So traditionally, every year our mission team celebrates Thanksgiving on the Saturday after–hence, today!

We always manage to get a turkey from somewhere–often have a student at boarding school bring one down from Kenya, but I think that this year our team had a friend bring us a turkey from Dubai (United Arab Emerites). Yep, you got it, American Thanksgiving with an Arab turkey.

And if I do say so myself, we always manage to do pretty well for ourselves with the ingredients found here. Mmmmm….here’s all our (very homemade) pies.

This team is our family while we are here. We meet with them once a week to pray, and over the years, they have cried with us, loved us, and supported us. Thanksgiving is definitely not the same without our biological family, but I am so thankful for my surrogate family.

God is good. I am so incredibly, amazingly grateful for His wonderful grace in my life. My husband, my children, my parents, all of our needs provided for, ministry that we love, the churches and families who financially support us…I am indeed blessed.

And I am, by the way, significantly more joyful regarding God’s change in our plans for our Home Assignment. A couple hard days…and then acceptance and peace. I look forward to seeing what He has in store for us.

Oh, one more very, very cute thing….while taking the above picture, we were all delighted to hear Josiah say “Cheeeeeeeeeessssse!” (in baby language) for each of the three cameras that took the picture. With no prompting from us. He is definitely his father’s son.