Dear friends,  I’m in the midst of a very busy time. While trying to take care of my family, helping my son have a good 16th birthday and take my wife and daughter to appointments at Univ of WA Med Center, etc., I’m also up to my ears in stateside and global trainings. I just finished walking the 15 leaders and staff of Hope Community Church through a Pathways training this weekend, which went very well. On Friday I leave for Ethiopia to conduct a training for a new network there, and along the way I’ll be meeting with a couple new key Kenyan partners in Nairobi who are very eager to start Pathways in their organizations. We are also looking to either continue or start new networks in 8-10 other locations (including Congo, Egypt, TZ, Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia, Togo, etc.), which I must oversee, supply leaders for, help to launch and maintain. 

OK, so that is a reasonably full plate, but I’ve not shared about the most consuming thing. I’m realizing that I bit off a VERY big bite in starting this program for a doctorate of missiology. Every week I have many readings, much scholarly research in academic journals and databases, and several postings which I must write, and that is just for one of my classes. In addition, I’m feeling the pressure that I need to complete doing research for and then writing two large papers for the classes I took over the summer, and the deadline for those papers is coming due in about seven weeks. Several of those weeks I will be gone doing trainings. So it looks like I will be needing to multi-task somehow, doing much study and writing on long plane flights, or getting much faster at reading, researching and writing, or something needs to give. I trust that God will bless my efforts, and I’m learning a lot, but the degree program is larger than life these days. Christ is still on the throne, whether I get assignments done or not, and of that I’m truly thankful.

So there you have it. I will continue to press on, but I just felt like I needed to vent a little of the pressure that I feel building. Ever onward, Eric