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April 26, 2007
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Louisville, where we are in the height of iris season, and young squirrels are leaping quite inexpertly from limb to limb, and sometimes missing and plonking down onto the lawn. Ouch!
I (Bruce) have survived another semester! Well, I don’t have grades back yet, but everything that can be done has been done, so it’s off my to-do list. I had two excellent courses this semester, each of them probably among the most useful ones in my whole program. The first was on linguistics, with a focus on teaching English and reading. We had class, and the usual papers and reading assignments, but then we also had a program of observing and teaching an ESL student in the public schools. I worked with a fifth-grade boy from Russia and had a great time. That took care of a couple of hours per morning, four days a week. On the fifth day, I observed at another elementary school for the second class, which was about qualitative research, the kind based on observations and interviews instead of statistics. This approach seems like it might be valuable in working with school systems overseas, so it opened up a lot of new thinking for me about what shape my thesis might take when the time for that comes.
In spite of the time spent in schoolwork, our work at the PC(USA) offices has been going really well. Lora has done a superb job of organizing, mostly because she has no ego issues involved in being the leader. She seeks and takes advice from all areas, and we all love working under her direction. Mission Challenge ’07 is becoming quite a big thing, and is being noticed by folks in a lot of different places. We will be sending mission speakers in October to 131 presbyteries (that’s more than 75 percent of them!) across the country in the biggest event of mission interpretation in church history. It’s like a huge puzzle, putting all the requests alongside what we can offer, and trying to put it all together so it meets as many expectations as possible, doesn’t kill off the missionaries, and all comes in under budget, too.
The conversation about possible assignments for us in a year and a half no longer includes Lesotho but has added Ethiopia and Russia. We obviously have no clue how all this will turn out, but we trust that they will come up with a place that fits our needs (a decent climate and electricity to run my sleep mask) with the needs of a partner church that runs a school system. Stay tuned for further bulletins as events warrant, or possibly even if they don’t. We remind ourselves that we had never heard of Vanuatu until we were appointed to teach there, and we trust that the church will come through again with another perfect match.
It now looks as though Kinsey really will graduate. She postponed a freshman social studies class until now, her senior year. She missed it because she didn’t enter school here until she was a freshman, and there just “wasn’t time” for it in her schedule, what with all the music she wanted to take. So she took it this year by independent study through the district office, and just finished the last half of it in a huge push over spring break. She’ll take the final next week after school. So, she will finish her freshman classes on May 2 and will graduate 23 days later. Hey, compared to her father, that’s in plenty of time! She has scholarships (half in music and half in academics) to the University of Louisville that will cover tuition, so she will still have to come up with room and board. Savings should cover that, at least for a while, and we all agree that it’s time that she lived out of this house.
She was working the cash register at Panera a couple of weeks ago and a woman looked at her name tag and said, “Kinsey. Hmm. Are you Kinsey Whearty?” Kinsey fessed up, and the woman introduced herself. She turned out to be the local vocal professor at the University of Louisville. She explained that she had heard that Kinsey was really good at singing, but had decided to drop vocal performance in favor of band because she wasn’t allowed to have a double major. The woman asked, “Is your manager here?” Kinsey pointed him out, the woman had a quiet conversation with the manager, and then told Kinsey that it was OK for Kinsey to come outside with her. And there in the parking lot of Panera, dresssed in her work uniform, Kinsey auditioned for the Louisville’s vocal program. “Sing something by Mozart!” was the request, and Kinsey complied. Afterwards, the woman said that she would like Kinsey as a student, and they would work something out about the double major option. That’s a pretty cool audition story, especially since Kinsey was not arrested for disturbing the peace!
Emily has “graduated” from her violin teacher. After two years of study, Emily has completed five years worth of books, and her teacher thinks that it is time to move up the ladder a bit. So Emily will spend the next few weeks taking trial lessons from several folks, and then she will settle down with a new teacher for the next phase. She actually isn’t practicing as much as she used to. Zach, her boyfriend of seven months, takes up a lot of her time on phone calls and just hanging around the house here. He’s a nice kid, but like all parents, I guess I would prefer that Emily wait at least until she’s 34 before getting serious about anybody.
The last time that I wrote to all of you like this, I told you that I was going to speak in Lackawanna Presbytery in northeastern Pennsylvania. That one got snowed out, so now I get to say the same thing: this weekend I’m finally going to Pennsylvania. They had to reschedule their whole meeting.
Spring here has been spectacular, and we have loved the flowering trees, the soft rains, and the cardinal song in the early mornings. We are busy, but remarkably happy and sane (at least it appears that way to us!). Lora is getting her spinning wheel glued back together, and knitting most evenings. She walks every morning. I am swimming a mile most mornings and playing the recorder every day.
Thank you so much for your patience with us! We love you all!
Love and peace,
Bruce
The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer
& Study, p. 259 |
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