Our Christmas Vacation in Review

As many of you may know Hannah and I made a surprise visit home to Ohio for the holiday vacation. It went something like this. After more than 30 hours of travel by train, bus, airplane, and car...we finally arrived in Lexington on the evening of December 23rd. With the help of the Hange/Grieve family and the Ross daughters we managed to keep the whole thing a secret from Hannah's parents. At just the right moment, we walked in from their garage like it was the most usual thing in the world...and then watched the surprise take hold. They never saw it coming. You could tell from the look on their faces that their minds were trying to do the math, but somehow things weren't adding up. After the initial explosion of sound things managed to die down and we had a wonderful time catching up before splitting up to spend more time with our families alone for the Christmas holiday. It was a great time for both of us to reconnect with our parents and siblings after being apart for so long.

Over the next few days we did a lot. We:

1. Celebrated Christmas with our families
2. Saw our new niece, Celia, and attended her baptism
3. Went ice-skating with my Dad and other niece, Kathryn and the Alexanders
4. Went snowboarding with my mother, my sister and her boyfriend, Matt
5. Did a little shopping with the Ross sisters
6. Had two wonderful Christmas dinners
7. Watched a little Penn State footbal with Sam, Grandpa, and the gang
8. Went for a hike and had some wonderful coffee with the Kukuks
9. Munched a few Christmas cookies
10. Visited GFC for New Years Eve
11. Ran into a few friends at Target
12. Had lunch with a pal and his gal at Applebees
13. Ran a few miles to off-set the not so few cookies

...and that about covers it. Forgive me if I forgot anything, please.

We regret that time was so limited and we couldn't see as many of you as we would have liked. There are so many of you we wanted to reconnect with but between the jet-lag and the desire to balance quality-time with quantity-time, all we can say is that we did the best we could and we are grateful for the blessing of being able to spend the holidays with family and friends, even as little as we could. We promise to make it up to you all in April when we return to America.

And yes, we are returning to America sometime in April. We're not sure of the exact date as of yet, but we will be there. At this stage in our plans there are still a lot of questions left to be answered, but we are faithful God will lead and guide.

And now the New Year is already upon us. I know many don't make them, but we have a few New Years resolutions we are making...and which we hope to keep.

1. We want to "be present" in Japan for the duration of our stay here, and truly finish well
2. We want to take time to reflect upon what we've learned here in Japan and try to bring the best of it back with us to our life in America
3. We want to look ahead to the coming months of transition prayerfully, resting in the peace which only God can bring, especially in areas of finances, careers, and our futures

Thanks for reading and for all your support.

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