Short Trip

I'm on my way back to Uganda now.  It was a short trip, but a blessed one.  

Some highlights:

>On the flight over the Atlantic I was the gracious recipient of an unexpected and unasked for upgrade to business class.  It was a precious reminded that God was taking care of me and giving me the rest that I needed.

>I had a lovely visit with my brothers.  One advantage of not having my own children with me was that I was able to visit with my nephews and nieces.  My middle brother has children with the sweetest southern accents.  I could have sat for many hours answering their many questions about the Nile, hippos and power outages.  My oldest brother has 3 very energetic children who have been trained quite well to not wake up their parents in the morning...even when I told them they could tell their daddy that Auntie Dianna sent them to jump on him.  Like great stoics they refused to betray the souls from which they were borne.

My oldest brother's children...go Cranes... :)

> My uncle's funeral was a blessing.  He was a joy-filled person despite his mental illness and will be missed by so many in the community who had reached out to him.  Prayers would be appreciated for my parents as they have an enormous task of cleaning out his house and getting things settled.

> Chic-fil-A gave me a lovely welcome home treat by giving me my meal for free and 8 cows to take to the kids.

>On my way to Georgia, I had the random thought of "I bet there is a 5k race I could do while I'm in town."  Sure enough, the football team had organized one on Saturday. (Not for a noble cause such as cancer or blindness, I might add...but rather all proceeds went to the great and amazing cause to... ahem..."feed the football team before games"...gotta love small southern towns)  None-the-less, I ran it and beat my best personal time and got second place for my age group.  (There may or may not have only been 3 people in my age group, but someone's gotta get second, right?? )

>Eric and kids and Christi and visitor Amy had an interesting few days without power or water.  The power poll outside of our compound fell and dropped live wires in our yard.  We praise the Lord that no one was hurt even though many of the kids and our yard worker were standing right near the area that it fell in.  The water also ran out that day leaving them with no power, no water and no momma.  But now, power is back, water is back and soon I'll be back too!

Thanks for praying for us! :)