Two steps forward, one step back...

We have been back in South Africa for two weeks time now and we are essentially living the phrase “Two steps forward, one step back.”

Our mission during this two week period was to accomplish some pretty major things:
1. Go to a few hardware stores and order a lot of supplies for building our house
2. Once these supplies have been delivered, we need to repack our containers.
3. We need to finalize the trucking company who will import our goods to Zambia.
4. We need to finalize the paperwork to export our vehicle from SA to Zambia.
5. A few errands for ourselves, a few errands for the base.
6. We need to serve papers listing a Final Demand to the two companies who still have not delivered the containers we ordered last year. This requires a lawyer and police assistance.
7. We wanted to spend some quality time with friends here and enjoy worshipping at our former church.

Now that I look at this list, it seems pretty presumptuous that we could accomplish all these things in two weeks time, even if everything had gone according to plan…and things haven’t.

We’ve had significant struggles with using the company credit card, the quotes we received had to be redone, salesmen promised to send information and return calls and didn’t, we drove to pick up supplies only to find they stocked it but for 5x the price we expected to pay, Dan got stuck in traffic for 3 hours, Janell caught a teller mistake as she was going to charge us R10,000 instead of R1,000 and then the hassle of getting that returned to our card, our insurance got dropped because that essential letter got sent to our old office instead of the new, this morning we found we got sent to Collections for not paying a TV tax (we don’t live in SA anymore so the tax won’t apply and they lost our paperwork saying we moved…), did I mention that Titus now is throwing up?! These have been the “steps back”.

We definitely have accomplished a lot, but there is much to be done still. Will you please say a prayer for our family? Our stress level is pretty high. We’d really love to get these challenging things behind us so that we can be free to return to ministry in Zambia. Our next class begins the end of August and we want to be there when they arrive. Please pray for details to fall into place quickly with all the above issues and for peace!!

We have loved catching up with friends here!  This has definitely been the best part - so good for our hearts!!