A happy New Year to everyone from the greens of Northern Ireland!  That’s right: we’re here, finally, for the first time in five months. We arrived into Dublin Airport via Aer Lingus yesterday morning and from there caught a bus to Banbridge, a town about 10 miles from our base. 

We’re excited to be in our new home and are anxious to settle in.  However, we’ve a lot of work ahead of us.  Besides just finding a place for our stuff, we need to do a fair bit of patching and painting, as well as working on the bathroom and carving out an office space somewhere.  Also, one of our immediate priorities is also finding an automobile that will suit our needs.  Now that we’ll be cooking, and therefore shopping for ourselves, we need to establish reliable means of getting into town, the nearest of which are 8-10 miles from our rural homestead (the only proximate amenities are a pub and a hardware store, neither of which sell bread and cheese).  In the mean time, we’re unpacking and cleaning and hoping that jet lag will pass us by, though yesterday was really the difficult hump in the road. 

As far as YWAM Closkelt goes, everything looks about the same, minus and plus a few faces.  The current Discipleship Training School (DTS) have enjoyed a week’s break over Christmas and are now entering the last week and a half of their Lecture Phase before splitting heading out on outreach, one team around Ireland and No. Ireland, and the other to Serbia.  We’re also looking ahead to the start of the next DTS at the end of this month.  Though we’ll not be leading or staffing this school, we’ll be involved in its maintenance.  We are hoping to sit down sometime soon with the school’s leader, Jessica, and see how she is doing and what needs to be done.  But more on the DTS and changes in YWAM Closkelt later… 

All in all, we are well.  Thank God for a smooth and safe journey (with all our luggage this time!), as well as for the past five months of sharing the vision that God has given us with our communities, of being continually blessed, and of time spent with friends and family in the United States of America.