God's Timing is Perfect

Yolanda is excited her visa is finally here!

As you know, we have been waiting for Yolanda's UK Visa (including passport) to arrive before we could leave, and it finally did last week! It took several weeks longer than expected, but we were thankful Yolanda was approved for the visa. Obviously, we are a month later than we had hoped to leave for Zimbabwe, but God always seems to bring positives out of every situation.  Here are a few positives that came because we were still in the U.S. during the last few weeks:

• Yolanda and I were able to visit and help my grandpa (92) recover from a hip replacement surgery in Michigan, after a fall while getting shoulder x-rays.
• We were able to help my dad in his recovery from a planned partial knee replacement surgery.
• We drove my parents to, and attended my sister's graduation for her master's degree in Michigan.
• Yolanda and I were able to use some gift money we received for our wedding to buy some household items. This will save us lots of money not having to buy these things in Zimbabwe. There was not any time for us to purchase these items before our previous departure date, so we took advantage of the extra time here. We will be able to ship them to New York to meet up with our other boxes that we shipped last month, which are still being held there until we leave. All of our boxes will be able to go to Zimbabwe in the same shipment, arriving after we do.
• Although we missed celebrating Yolanda's mom's birthday, we will be able to celebrate Yolanda's birthday (5/22) with her mom and brother in London, as we will still take some time to visit them.

This leads me to our new departure date.  We will fly out of Chicago on May 20. Even though it is several weeks after we had hoped, nothing has changed about our goals and plans for our time in Zimbabwe. We will still be there for 6 months, staying through the end of November. Our new return date to the U.S. is December 10th.

Yolanda has been spending a lot of time studying Hebrew lately. She is grateful for the opportunity to learn the language, even though it isn't easy. Her semester ends this week, with several key assignments and papers due. We decided it was best not to be traveling during these last couple weeks while Yolanda is working on her most important classwork of the semester.

We continue to appreciate your prayers, notes, and words of encouragement! They mean the world to us, and are so very thankful for you and all of your support. Yolanda and I feel blessed that God has gone before us, and that His plans are best, along with His timing.

---