Christmas Wish List for the School

Cory and I will be heading home for Christmas to visit family for 2 weeks. We will be visiting Cory's parents in Abbotsford, then my parents in Kamloops and my friends back at the office at Trinity Western University for some business meetings.

There are a few things that I wish I had here for the computer lab, if you have any of these things lying around could you please pass them off to either one of our parents or my office at TWU?

• Mousepads
• Optical Mice (the ball-mice keep getting clogged with dust)
• Keyboards that are not super stiff (we have some but they really slow the keyboarding students down because they are so hard)
• Hard-drives (Anything over 2 GB)
• Network cables (those blue or grey things used for Internet - not the phone lines but the high-speed ones)
• Wireless router (for our teachers who have laptops)
• Network Switches (10okb or higher)
• Memory (especially 333 DIMM's but also 100 and 133 too)
• NIC (Networking) cards
• Wireless Network recievers
• USB scandrives for teachers to save files onto
• Legal copies of Windows 95 or 98
• Legal copies of Office 97 or 2000
  

And if you have anything that would work for a school bell (electric thing for 3 different buildings) that would be great.

(If you have anything could you please add it to the comments below and where you will drop it off - my parents in Kamloops, Cory's parents in Abbotsford, or my office at TWU)

Chris

Opportunities and Encouragements

Two things we really need prayer for

1. Opportunities: I heard something the other day (but I fogot what it was now) about how we need to pray to see the opportunties all around us. Cory and I prayed that yesterday and before we even said amen we saw some fellow teachers we could give a ride. Small things yes, but we really want to be a blessing. Could you please pray God gives us opportunities.
   
   
2. Encouragment: We just passed mid-terms and are now a quarter of the way through our time here. We have found he honeymoon stage to be over and are learning to rely on God for strength to face new challenges and to find pleasures in the joys. Please pray God will give us little encouragements throughout our day.

Thanks again for all your prayers.

Hurricane Update

Thanks for everyone who has been praying for us. Other than a lot of rain and strong winds everything is the same as normal (in fact the rain and winds are sort of normal too). Please keep us in your prayers and all those whom the hurricane might hit.

Chris

Have you ever wanted to throw a computer out of the window??

One of the neat parts of my role here is looking after the computer lab. Ever since my first computer of Christmas grade 8 one of my favorite things is to take the computers apart. So in computer class we sometimes take the computers apart. The problem is some of them are just barely hanging in there, that was the problem today.

Senerio: We have 9 computers, 6 work well and 3 are almost dead. I need to reformat the 3 to make them work better but if I start I'm not sure it will work out since I don't have the original disks for all the parts.

Blessing: One of the parents just gave me two of their old computers. One is actually a 500mhz computer (fairly decent) but when I turned it on the hard-drive was dead. No big deal I have an extra drive from a dead computer (but no OS yet). The other one is a 166MHZ and surprising I just plugged it in and it worked.

Process: So I decided to back up all the computers by making an image of each drive so if I mess up or something goes wrong (like the power going off twice a day and corrupting the system) I have something to go back to. I backup up the new 166mhz system and then formated the drive to test it. When I restored it the computer no longer accepted the drive. Nuts! So I stuck it in another computer and the drive actually loaded (until it froze b/c the hardware was so different). Then I took that computer drive and stuck it in the 166 and it loaded which means the cables and all are working. That's good. But when I put the other drive back that computer did not work now. Oh oh! Several hours later I still haven't figured it out, I'm hoping that when I come back in the morning it will work. So the drive works and the cables work but they don't work in the computer.

Solution: None known yet. But we have 7 working computers and 3 temperarily disabled ones.

Prayer Request: Pray I can get the computers working again and not lose too much hair in the process.

How did the Marriage Retreat go?

Thank-you to everyone that prayed for Cory and I at the marriage retreat. We really needed it. There has been so much rain lately that the road was all washed out. Fortunately someone borrowed our group a really big 4x4 and we plowed through about 2 feet of mud and water.

The talks went well too. I was concerned about them because we were cramming 6 weeks of marriage planning into 3 hours but God answered our prayers and people made some progress. Probably the most helpful was just having everyone sit back and just think about what is most important in life. I mean so often we spend our life working for something we think is important and then look back and go, "I wish I had only...." "been at home" or "given more to God". So we tried to skip the step of wasting time and focus on what is important now.

Download the PowerPoint presentation here

Speaking at Young Married Retreat Oct 7-9

I have been invited to speak at the young married retreat this weekend (Oct 7-9th). It will be at the Cahal Pech Resort in San Ignacio. On the fun side this will be a great retreat for Cory and I including a trip to the Mayan ruins, canoeing the river, strengthening friendship with other young married and maybe even doing some cave tubing or canoeing (something we so want to do).

I have been doing a lot of praying about what I should speak about and after talking to the leaders it seems best to do a strategic planning workshop. The core idea is that God has been taking each couple on a journey and has brought them together for a purpose. It is important to stop and reflect on the path God has brought us on so we can align (or at least surrender) ourselves to the path God has before us.

Friday night: Values - What is most important to you
Saturday morning: Mission - What do we believe God has called us to do
Sunday morning: Vision (and Plan) - How are we going to get there?

I took a class last year at ACTS seminary on Strategic Planning and for my major assignment Cory and I rewrote the strategic planning process (usually done for Churches and businesses) and applied it to marriage. In this we wrote a very detailed plan which we used to decide if Belize was a match with where we sense God is taking us.

Here are some prayer requests:

• For incredibly insight and inspiration as I prepare the talks. I need to fit a 1 month process into 3 one hour sessions.
• For clarity as I speak that the group will understand and be able to apply it
• That God will give the group incredible insights into the path he has for them and direction on what He wants them to be focusing on at this stage in their marriages.
• That Cory and I will be able to build rich and meaningful relationships that will have a lasting spiritual impact on us and them.