George Family Update 1...

At Long Last...

GET YA NEWS! GET YA NEWS FOLKS! THE GEORGE FAMILY FINALLY ARRIVES AT NEW TRIBES! Four years plus prior to this week God began to finally narrow our vision and calling for foreign missions. For me, I was hit like sack of hammers after returning home from my first over seas mission trip to El Salvador. I remember walking through the door of my parents house and my dad greeting me there and saying this..."Well, you glad to back in the States?" All at once this epiphany came over me (as if epiphanies happen any other way.) "No, not really dad. I miss being over there." Before you think I'm patriotically waving the colors of any country, please let me clarify. While I'm most certainly proud to call the U.S. my home and feel blessed to have had the religious freedoms that we do I simply missed being out of the environment of foreign missions. My trip to El Salvador was the first time I had ever been to a place that didn't seem to have a church on ever street corner, or find people who had no previous exposure to the Gospel message. Coming home, I was simply left with a hunger to be a part of that work.

Over the course of our engagement and marriage, God began honing our heart's desires in. Little by little, then, by leaps and bounds. The idea of people around the globe without any access to the saving power of the Gospel message became a burden to say the very least. The thought of thousands of people groups without a single word of the Bible in a language they could understand became an excruciating thought. Via my wife and the World Wide Web we were exposed to the work of New Tribes Missions and today, here we are in Roach, MO four days away from our first training class to prepare us to take Jesus to those who have never heard before.

May God give long life to those people around the globe who are waiting to here of His love for them.

5 More Minutes Mom!!!

At at given moment I feel like I'm going to wake up to sound of my mom's shrill voice "JOHN MICHAEL....TIME TO GET UP...........JOOOOHHHNNN MMMIIIICCCCHHHAAEEELLL!" Argh! I love my mom like crazy, but when she yells it's like one of those veloca raptor things on Jurassic Park. I can still smell my high school cafeteria, and feel that hardened blob of bright green gum against my knee that I could never get off of the underneath side of my desk in 11th grade chem class. Ok...close my eyes...now open!!! Nope still here, still married, still a daddy. This is crazy! Don't read this wrong. I have absolute ZERO desire to revisit my teenage days, but there's just no way that I'm a dad of two little girls (one of which will turn three in just a few short months,) no way I've been married for four years, no way I've bought and sold a house, no way I've lived overseas, worried about health care, actually watched the news to hear about the stock market as if I had some sort of legitimate worries. ......... This is nuts! I'm just John Michael. Pimpled face, knappy hair kid who just sort of is here...that's it. It's hard to look back on the last five or so years of my life and piece together everything that got me to where I am now...sitting on my couch, with my wife and two little girls in the next room over asleep, one month away from moving (for the 8th time of my 4 year marriage) to train for the next 1 1/2 years to be a missionary to unreached tribal people for the rest of my, physically capable, adult life. Seriously!?

After a short break to read over what I've already written and to admire my extreme misuse of ellipses and run-on sentences, I realized that spoken tone could very well be lost in typed text. So "..." let me clarify one thing. I am EXTREMELY happy with my life and where I am today. I have two amazing little girls who make me feel like superman and a wife who is way to pretty to be married to me. I'm truly a blessed guy. My life is just so awkwardly forgiven that I have a hard time believing it's real sometimes.