August 2019

What a creative title, right? That's what comes when you post so many in short amount of time. :) 

Right after the team left, Steve and I flew to Singapore for my wrist surgery. We thought it would be a fairly minor surgery, but the doctor ended up recommending a more radical procedure that she thought would work better in the long run. It entailed getting a tendon from my left hand, drilling holes in both bones of my right wrist, and using the tendon to reconstruct the joint. This was a much more major surgery than we had anticipated, and having BOTH wrists out of commission was definitely a surprise. We stayed in Singapore for about a week, then flew back to Manila just before school started for the boys in August. My recovery went very slowly and painfully, with complete immobilization for the first 6 weeks then 4 hours daily of PT for several months after that. Needless to say, I got a little behind on household and administrative responsibilities. :) Very thankful though for my family as well as the many friends here who brought us food and helped out during that time.

 Towards the end of August, we traveled to another island for important meetings we had been planning for a long time. One Sending Body is the sending entity for Southern Baptists in the Philippines, and Steve has been serving as a consultant to them for several years to help them send workers internationally more strategically. As part of this, we had the dream of developing a partnership with our organization so that OSB could send workers directly to join our teams in other countries - fill the need for workers in the harvest as well as provide strategic, established teams for Filipinos to join. We had a training the end of 2018 to prepare for this partnership, and August was the time to officially launch the partnership. It was an exciting time, and we can't wait to see what God is going to do through this strategic partnership! 

While I actually joined Steve for this meeting (he was working with the Filipino leadership; I was the host for the American team who came to make it all official), I was still very much in recovery and actually missed a lot of the sessions because I wasn't feeling up to it yet. Still so thankful that I was able to be a part of it, even if limited in capacity.