Prayer Mail

Dear friends,
This is our public prayer mail for this week.
Our mission work continues.

Thanksgivings:

1) Julie and I had a great time at the diocesan missions conference at Christ Church in Ballston Spa, yesterday. I preached at both services, and Julie updated folks on our online missionary plans and answered questions at our table display. It was a great turnout, we connected with folks, and moved forward regarding additional online course-management-system possibilities.

2) Our friends in both Belize and Tanzania seem to be proceeding with enthusiasm over the online possibility; although culturally, "moving ahead with enthusiasm" takes on a different time-frame, depending where you live. For example, scheduling a site visit to Tanzania requires a visa application process, a reasonable air-fare lead-time of about a month, and trying to make a visit while students are on campus - which is determined in part by the variety of wet and dry seasons.

We will have more news on our progress in our monthly May e-letter, planned for next week. It will be our pre-diocesan convention newsletter. We look forward to catching up with you in June at the convention in the Diocese of Albany at Camp of the Woods, if you can make it.

3) Julie had a great visit with her parents, sister, and brother-in-law in Longmont, Colorado.

Prayer requests:

1) The rest of Lydia's semester and summer plans. About one week of classes to go, then, exams.

2) Prayer for the upcoming parish visits. This coming Sunday, Julie and I plan to be traveling to Lake Luzerne, to preach and make a presentation.

3) Prayer about plans to teach theological college classes on-line, from the US to students in Tanzania and Belize, specifically. Part of our mission work entails the online course-management-system preparation work, as well as the course work preparation itself, and there is a lot of advanced work still to do. Site visits are a necessary part of this: preparing to set up, and annual reporting in, updating, monitoring, and planning.

And two additional things to pray about, related to this:
a) I am inspired to suggest that at some point, perhaps we might create "visiting-expert" video segments of 1 to 5 minutes per expert.

b) And, I am planning on making at least some Spanish translations/subtitles, for Belize from the English class materials for Belize that we would put together.

4) Prayer for discernment, provision, and guidance for the steps ahead, in general.

Thank you for praying for us. Your prayers are very important. We sense your prayers, and I pray for you every day.

God bless you,
In Christ,
Shaw+, and on behalf of Julie+