The Timeline!

Now that we have our visas, many of you are probably wondering if we are heading back to Austria soon. Receiving our visas this early was very unexpected and caused us to reevaluate our timeline for staying in England. We want to balance honoring our commitment to the missionaries here with getting back to Vienna, where we believe God has truly called us. We also want to be financially responsible. We've paid for our apartment here in Lichfield through the middle of March and that is not refundable.

In order to determine next steps and timelines, we spent time praying and discussed the situation with our field leaders in Vienna, as well as our teammates here in England. We then determined the following schedule:

• February 20 – 23: Visit to Vienna to pick up our visas and begin our apartment search
• February 23 – March 13: Finish out our time (and our apartment rental) in England
• March 13 - 31: Return to Vienna and continue searching for an apartment. Stay with teammates (no rent!) and possibly meet with a language tutor.
• April 1 – 5: Participate in the Austria WorldVenture team retreat in Grundlsee, Austria (we last attended this on our Vision Trip in 2011 and we're excited to be back!)
• Sometime in April: Move into a long term apartment and have our household good delivered from the US! Begin language school at the end of April.

We are eager and excited about these next steps. The thought of having a home to “call our own” is very exciting to us, after nearly 2 years living a transitive lifestyle. I am so excited to have our container delivered - it will be like Christmas to see our of our household goods again!

Please pray for patience these next few months, as we walk through the final steps towards being settled in Vienna. I tend to be eager about planning and sometimes I push forward too fast. Please pray that I wait on the Lord and his timing for finding an apartment and getting settled. We want to land in just the right place, a neighborhood where we can reach out and stay for the next 3 - 5 years.

Exciting things are ahead and we're just one step closer to "home"!