Sabbatical Granted
Sabbatical Granted
How do you have a home assignment if you live and serve in your own home country? In January, we wrote our supervisors, "After almost five years in this role, we are feeling weary and sense the need to temporarily withdraw from some of our normal activities in order to finish our ministry years strong." Gratefully, at age 62, we have been granted our first-ever sabbatical from April 1 to June 15. What are our objectives for this time?
- Be Released from meetings and administrative work and find Renewal through Rest, travel, Reading, Reflection and Retreat.
- Re-engage with present and past partners and Rebuild our partner base.
- Reorganize and Revise various trainings that we offer.
- AND, we will be Returning to the Philippines for the first time in over five years (attending a field conference and facilitating various training events). Before the Philippines, we will go to China for two weeks to visit various cities where new OMF workers live and serve.
Pray for us as we continue to put together details for these travels and plan the rest of our sabbatical. Since this sabbatical was not part of our 2018 budget, we are trusting the Lord to provide for what is needed. If you are interested in knowing how you can help, please let us know. Perhaps the song Gracefully Broken by Matt Redman will help you to understand how to pray for us.
And multiply, God, all that I am
And find my heart on the altar again
Set me on fire, set me on fire"
A Busy Month Ahead
We head to Denver tomorrow (Feb 13) for HART (Home Assignment
Reunion and Training) where we will be in our OMF U.S.office
with 18 of our missionaries back from China, Myanmar, Thailand,
Indonesia and Malaysia. Pray for us to be good
listeners above all. May God help our team to offer
debriefing and provide information and answers on the burning
topics people bring. More than anything, people want to
connect with other like-minded people and hear what God is
doing around the world.
As soon as we return from Denver, we head into the missions
conference of Cypress Bible Church. We are excited to celebrate
God's faithfulness with the church that sent us out over 31
years ago.
After a few days at home, David heads to Dallas Seminary in
order to connect with students interested in missions while
Doris finishes up preparations on a leadership training that
she will co-lead for our OMF Canada team from March 19-23.
Please pray for Doris and Becky as they
convert an existing week-long live training into a live virtual
training over five consecutive
mornings.
Thank you for praying for our financial support in 2017--we ended up at 91% and we are grateful that the sharing component of OMF U.S. helped top up some of our essential accounts that finished in a deficit.
With much love and appreciation,
David and Doris
David cell: 979-402-6040
Doris cell: 979-422-5009
david.nichols@omfmail.com
doris.nichols@omfmail.com
Top
Non-Fiction Reads for 2017: Becoming Leonardo, Becoming
Curious, The Listening Life, Silence, The Perfect Pass and
Inferno in Chechnya were a few of my favorites. In 2017
fiction, I was delighted to discover Laurie King's series on
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes and completed Bernard
Cornwell's Warrior Chronicles. Also highly enjoyable
was The Underground Railroad. If you want a list of
all the books I read in 2017 you can look
here in my dropbox account.