After spending the last week down in Spanaway with Lorraine’s parents, we’re up in Everett, with mine. Lorraine had a wisdom tooth out on Monday, and she’s still recovering (apparently the dentist spent the last half hour of the surgery saying “oh, wow, that’s bigger than I thought!”). In general, we’re happy–we’ve bought an enormous stack of paperbacks to take back to Brazil and we have our little orange dog with us, so life is pretty good.

Our flights (from Rio to Sao Paulo to Washington DC to Seattle) all went smoothly, and we, plus our luggage, came through safely. Thanks for all the prayers & well wishes.

If you could keep those going, we’re actually already thinking about our flight back to Brazil. We’re on a wait list for tickets to leave on August 3, which we really need. So, if you could pray that those tickets come through, we’d appreciate it.

Curiously, even though it is fast approaching winter here in the southern hemisphere, everyone at school refers to the vacation we’ve just started as “summer” break. As in “Have a great summer, see you next year” being written in all the yearbooks we passed out on Friday.

Speaking of yearbooks, the end of the school year is always a time of goodbyes. The goodbyes at ICS-Rio are particularly poignant, because our students don’t just move out of town, they move to other continents. We are sad to see some of our most beloved faces leaving right now, and will miss them in the coming school year. In some ways, I feel like we shortchanged them because we got to school so late. We’ve only known these kids six months, but we still love them.

I will lead worship at Union Church one more time before we leave, then there’s Tim’s birthday on Monday, frantic packing, and we fly out at 6 PM on Wednesday. Please pray for a safe journey for us, and for all the students and staff who are leaving us right now.

As impossible as it is to believe, the school year is winding down. This is particularly difficult to believe down here, where we are entering winter, rather than summer. Lorraine & I are both wearing fleece jackets right now, if you can believe that.

Finals are coming up at the end of this week, and so most of our attention is bent towards that. Once finals are done, we still have a week of classes (no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense), and we’ll be flying back to the NW on the 18th.

I’d like to take this moment to reflect on a year of teaching but I can’t. For one, I’m not done–I still have plenty to do between now and the end. And for another, it’s only been half a year! I am definitely looking forward to running my own classes for an entire year, starting in August.