Missing you, Daddy!

It dawned on me I could post a blog all by myself while Corey is in Africa ("Af-uhkup" as Hannah says). It wasn't that hard to figure out, now if I can just get this dang "easy share" camera to load the pictures I can show you a little bit of what we've been doing here with Shishaw and Pawpaw! We love you, CoreyDaddy and can't wait to see you again!

Some notable things that are happening:

1. Shiloah is on the verge of cutting her two bottom teeth! I can see them in there and she has been quite miserable. We got her some magic teething tablets that are helping her out a lot.

2. Shiloah is also eating a lot of solid food now -- she doesn't like any of the fruits we have given her but enjoyed her carrots today. She eats her rice cereal like a champ and has adjusted quite nicely to a four hour feeding schedule, thankfully.

3. Hannah can now immitate a froggie, a flamingo, a hippo and a scary tiger. She gets the biggest kick out of scaring people with her tiger immitation. Last night when Pawpaw came home she almost laughed herself drunk because of how funny it was to scare him! It was the hardest I have ever seen her laugh, from deep inside her belly!

4. Shiloah is sitting up almost perfectly now, but topples over ever so often. She's tough, though.

5. Hannah has been a doctor, a princess, a kitty kat, and gotten to do so many fun things around the house with Shishaw. That's the first person she cares about in the morning. All she wants me for now is owies and bedtimes, diaper changes and a few other things. She loves her Shishaw!

I just realized that we have far more pictures of Hannah than Shiloah during our time here. Poor Shaft-shew! Always getting the shaft. Isn't she just the sweetest thing ever?

I love you, Corey, I can't wait for you to come home!

Rough Transition

A brief update on the Paxton family,

I miss my beautiful girls already. I was very sad to leave them today even though I am excited for this trip. I am sure you know that feeling of anticipation mixed with sadness.

We had a difficult time transitioning from LA to Raleigh. Obviously, we have been through a lot of change, and it has absolutley broken our hearts to see Hannah's world and friends upended. Hannah has been very sad, and even got sick because her schedule got so thrown up. She woke up Friday night throwing up, and has been a bit of zombie at times since then. The last two days she has bounced back a bit, but I was even more sad to leave her and create more change.

Also, Raleigh is very humid. Very humid. I sweat a lot. Our AC did not work in our house when we moved in either. This made tired and sweaty people more frustrated. We got pretty settled in, but I felt like we lived at the store for the last five days and didn't get to spend as much time together as I would have liked. However, I am really glad we decided to go down to Raleigh before Africa and began to get settled even though it was hard on the girls.

Transitions are difficult for me in general, and this one has been especially hard--lots of uncertainty, lots of fear, lots of difficulty---Danielle and I remarked that sometimes we want to find our comfort in this world rather than in Christ, and this transition has brought that out in us.

Thursday night, we cried a lot, and really brought our hearts before the Lord. We were reminded of our calling to Him and to Raleigh, and our prayer is to be used to help move people toward participation in God's mission. While it has been a stormy season of life, the Lord is in the boat with us and calming our hearts.

We are so grateful for our community here and family who have helped us along the way. This life God is calling us to could not be possible without the help of others.

Thank you. We are so grateful.

Peace in Him

Corey

A Dangerous Prayer

Hello Friends

I am now sitting at Dulles Airport in DC getting ready to take off for our flight to Nairobi, Kenya to spend time with leaders of an orphan ministry to kids who have lost both their parents to AIDS. This trip is the climax of a long journey for me.

Let me share how I ended up at this point briefly.

Last summer, I became bombarded by the AIDS crisis in Africa, and felt like this is something that the church in the US has to find ways to partner with churches in Africa to do something about it. I also felt like we as individualistic Americans have a lot to learn from the African church as they start from a much more communal perspective on the world. As a leader in seminary, I prayed to God that if he could use me to do anything about the situation, that I needed to find people that I could trust to learn more about the culture and learn how to partner in a way that is healthy. I also know there are a ton of great organizations working to care for orphans in Africa, but my intuition told me that there have to be grassroots church ministries that could be multiplied if only we identify trustworthy leaders to partner with. I prayed for a friend and ministry partner, and God led me to Joseph.

Over the next few weeks, I started talking with my friend Kinoti Meme from our Fuller housing community who worked for World Vision in Kenya for three years before coming to Fuller to get his advice about these ideas. He led me to Joseph, a great friend of his and proven leader, who started taking in orphans who lost both their parents to AIDS a few years ago. Currently, they are caring for just over 90 orphans through their church, and are working to develop a holistic care sanctuary. Over the last year, Joseph and I have built a great friendship and we planned this trip to come to Kenya to see how God would lead us partner together in the future.

I also called my friend Jason, one of the pastors at our new church community, Visio Dei, and invited him to come along. We planned our trip for August 1-14.

Over that time, I felt like I didn't know enough about Kenyan culture so I started studying it with through my degree in Cross-Cultural Studies and learning about various models of orphan ministry.

During one of my classes, I contacted Dough Milham (who founded a non-profit called Discover the World to bridge gaps between resources in the west and the needs of orphans in Kenya), he has about thirty years on me and vast ministry experience including world vision in kenya.

Anyway, great guy, gives good hugs too.

We started meeting so I could learn about what he does and he asked me when I was planning to go to Kenya, and it turns out he had already planned a trip for Nairobi (the same place Joseph works) for the exact same dates we were planning to go. He helped us buy our tickets at a missionary discount and has been very helpful in preparing for the trip.

He is also coming to Joseph's ministry as a potential partnership for the future as well.

It is really crazy sometimes how God works, and I'm excited to be apart of this story and see how He leads us.

My prayer is that our relationship with rooted in Him, overflowing with love and depth of insight, and His passion for God's children that are in need of family and hope.

Please pray for us during our time there. Hopefully, I'll be able to post pictures on the blog and keep you updated.

Much Love

CP

In Virginia

Wow, we are here safely. That was a crazy day on wednesday and thursday leaving LA. Thank you to all our friends who made that happen with us. We couldn't have done it without you.

I haven't had some much time to process the whole thing yet. I will be posting some thought about our journey through seminary and back this week.

Peace

Corey

Exciting TImes

Some exciting updates.

1- Hannah turned two yesterday! We had a great party with some of our friends yesterday to celebrate our wonderful girl; although it is sad that we are saying goodbye to so many great friends

2- we got the job with CRM. As you know, we have a flair for the dramatic, and this happened three days before our move! It was a very intense process with them, and we felt really affirmed that God led our lives to intersect with their mission at just the right time.

CRM

3- our car is currently somewhere in the Idaho region of the country with Traci and Matt who are valiantly making their way towards Raleigh with our car

4- we are flying out of LA thursday

5- my last paper is in the process of being completed

THis has been a great journey for us that is taking new exciting turns at a great moment for us!

Also- Lo Lo is still sweet

Thanks to all have been praying for us through this process. We are incredibly grateful for the friends that we have.

A Couple More

“Other things being equal, classes with high social and economic privilege will scarcely be prone to evolve the idea of salvation. Rather they will assign to religion the primary function of legitimizing their own life pattern or situation in the world.” Max Weber

“I had hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom…Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itslef is neutral; it can be used either destrutively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good wil.. we must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.” MLK

A Few Intriguing Quotes

I am writing papers today and studying for exams (not exactly what I want to be doing on a beautiful Satruday in LA), but the light is at the end of the tunnel for me with school as we have less than two weeks left!

“God is always active and dynamic, never simply sanctioning the status quo, but always calling us to something deeper. The God of the gospel is a God of surprises who catches people off guard. What happens when God acts? Young folks have visions and old folk dream dreams. Water turns into wine. Mustard seeds grow into huge plants. Treasures get discovered in unexpected places. Holy people and prostitutes sit down for meals together. That what the kingdom of God is all about. North American culture is not terribly comfortable with this perspective.”

“Although Christ was a mystic, he did not philosophize or discourse about various truths. He demonstrated them. He didn’t argue that spiritual life should conquer matter; he walked on water. He didn’t argue the worth of womanhood, he treated them with infinite respect and appeared in resurrection first to a woman; he didn’t argue that God answers prayers, he prayed. Many teachers have tried to diagnose the disease of humanity---Jesus cures it.” E Stanley Jones

Gandhi said- “he would find God must have as much patience as the man who would sit on the ocean beach and take up a drop of water on a straw and put it asise and thus empty the ocean by carrying away one drop of water at a time.”

“The mission (of the church) is to become Christ’s very body in the world to bring about a relationship of shalom with God and throughout all of creation, including humankind.”

“An individual gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body, and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost and the other a corpse" E Stanley Jones

Elpis

Last night, we had a great time connecting to some new friends, Darrel and Rachel. We wish we would have got to know them better before. Both of them have huge hearts. They took a class on human trafficking at Fuller, and felt like they needed to do something about it to start mobilizing churches and faith communities. Basically, they are realizing that lots of people are raising awareness, but not many people know what to do help. So, they started Elpis- which means expectant hope in greek, and are tryint to both mobilize and create a network of churches/people that want to bring hope to people trapped in modern day slavery.

They are walking out into the unknown and God is connecting the dots for them along the way as they learn and grow in the process. It was exciting for Danielle to see more people get involved with this issue. We are excited to be in communication on the east coast while they work out on the west coast. Ideas travel fast, and we are looking for an abolitionist network to be established through churches in the US.

I thought one thing Darrel said was really profound: organized crime is more united and sacrificial than the church-- the russian mafia, eastern european gangs, tribal leaders, and american drug runners are more willing to work together (even though they usually hate each other) to smuggle women/children into our country than the church is willing to come together to bring light to people trapped in darkness---is money more powerful than the Spirit of Christ?

The Elpis Project

Right now, they have some great resources for awareness, but are just in the initial stages of getting a network started.

Car Repairs

I think going to get a car check up is one of the most dreaded things in my life. I am pretty much ignorant in the subject so anything they tell me I pretty much just have to go on intuition, and I always feel like I'm going to get over-charged.

Well, today it was different. I met Hrant. Hrant is a car-savior. He not only remembered my name and greeted me personally when I came to pick up the car, but he went through each charge point by point, the charge was under the estimate, he gave me a folder to keep my records in, told me I could bring it back if I had any problems, and he shook my hand with a smile.

Amazing. He is a picture of justice in action in the most unlikely place.

Blown Away by Love

We are leaving from Pasadena to move back to the East Coast in 16 days, and the amount that we are trying to do this summer is actually impossible without the help of others. Some kind of pride in me resists receiving love to this level and relying others, and I am really blown away by how people have responded to us.

My parents not only drove to Williamsburg to pack up a Uhaul for us from our house we are selling there, but went the extra 10 miles by making up for Uhaul and driving to Norfolk to pick it up because they didn't have one in Williamsburg. They then rearranged their schedule and loaded up the truck and drove it all the way to Raleigh to our new house.

Bryce, Laurie, and Braden also helped with stuff in Williamsburg as well as 4 Tribe football players that I haven't met yet.

Then, our new church community in Raleigh, re-arranged their schedule to help move in our stuff there in less than a half-hour. Wow. We reall are blown away. There will be a big party when we get there.

Shannon Smith said there should be MVP awards given out...and I think he is implying that he deserves it for carrying our grill without a wheel, our two ton TV, and our pull-out couch. Any others in the running?

Thank you so much for the love

Corey