This Was On Our Back Door During The Storm

We found this froggy hanging onto the back sliding door for dear life during the severe thunderstorms rolling through Tulsa tonight.

Newsletter - April 2010

Here is our April 2010 Newsletter. If you want to get this in your postal service mail, let us know and we can add you to our mailing list!

A New Season of Life

So, I have hesitated posting anything on our blog in awhile.  I guess, I really didn't know what to say.  On August 20th, 2009 my brother was involved in a car accident leaving him with a traumatic brain injury.  After a few days we returned to the states from Italy.  We had only lived in our new apartment in Verona for three months.  We have yet to return.  We have felt compelled to be in the states to be with Kevin, his kids and our family as he goes through the excruciatingly long process of recovery.  For six months, we functioned under a medical furlough and helped Kevin get from the hospital to an acute care facility to home.  We are currently living with him and caring for him as he recovers. 

Last month, we made the decision to transition out of our ministry in Italy to a support role for all the missionaries of our organization, Team Expansion.  We will continue to raise the support for our salary and ministry budget.  We will be based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, yet reaching out to many countries in the world through graphic design, illustration, website design, curriculum creation, video editing, etc....

This blog will continue to be about our lives as we try to follow God in whatever we do.  We are redesigning our website. thecrossers.com to reflect the changes and direction we are taking in missions around the world.  If you want to check out some of my art projects, personal and ministry related, go to my sketchblog at http://mattsketchpad.blogspot.com/.  If you want to read more about the medical and faith journey we are going on with the recovery of my brother, Kevin, head over to http://www.prayforkevin.com/.

Thanks for sticking with us and reading our news, following our ministry, praying for our effectiveness in missions and supporting the work through regular gifts.  If you would like to help us out in any way, please write.

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Weekly Exploration - Home Follow Up

This is a follow up to my earlier post, Weekly Exploration....

When I go out exploring, I like to find the streets off the beaten path. It's easy to find the 'touristy' streets, there are signs to them! But where do the Italians go? There is a street called, Via Mazzini that leads from Piazza Bra' (the largest town square in Italy, the guidebooks say) to Piazza Erbe (the site of the ancient Roman forum in Verona). This street, Mazzini, is lined with ice cream shops, newsstands and expensive stores. It is almost always packed with people! Italians would say, 'pieno di gente' while holding their fingers tight together and pointing them up, which means 'full of people".

I love that area, it is always bustling and full of life. Sometimes though it is so packed with tourists you can't imagine locals wading through the raff of people. So I love to meander through the alleys finding new passageways and nooks. Sometimes I'll walk all the way down an alley only to find it leads nowhere! Maybe a few doors, but nothing more. Today I found several streets that seemed out of the way for the out-of-towner. I found one street that was closed off to cars, set up for a two day blues festival (here's the program). Several restaurants with their outdoor seating were preparing for tonight's program of blues bands and tomorrow's full day of events. Another street held all the new stores that I listed on my earlier post. And other streets were brimming with people, but there were no tourists in sight. This is Italy. These are the people that we have come to tell about Christ and the relationship that they can have with him. For now, I will continue to explore the city, praying as I walk.


For more on:
Piazza Erbe
Piazza Bra

Weekly Exploration

Here I am sitting on a little street in Verona. For awhile I will have a weekly exploration as part of my schedule. Earlier I helped an old man whose receipt had been stolen by the wind and swept under a nearby car. Then I looked longingly at the charcoaler and attachments in the window of a garden store closed for the holidays. The 15th of August is a major holiday here. So far I went into a tiny little catholic church, found a comic book store, a music store, a handmade jewelry store where I want to take Angie, and several new restaurants including another japanese sushi restaurant. There are several of these in Verona. It was closed. Yet not everything is closed...so off I go exploring and praying as I do.

New Prayer Journal

I have been working on a new prayer journal. I saw the idea in a magazine. It is a crafty little project and that is right up my alley. I love crafts!! I bought a photo album/scrapbook. The kind that is spiral bound and has cardstock as pages. Back when we were in the states I did the crafty part by decorating all the pages and laying out how I was going to divide it up. I decided on family, nieces and nephews (yes, I know they are family but they get their own section), friends and our team. Then you print off pictures of each person and put them on their page. Around their photo you write things you want to pray about for that person. Then you can flip through and look at their face as you pray. I finally, with the help of my hubby, printed off the pictures today. Tonight after dinner when we are watching some TV I am going to put my pictures in the album. I can’t wait to get up tomorrow and start praying though the faces that I love!

Installing Our Kitchen

So, we've shared this before but when you rent an apartment it comes with an unfurnished kitchen. Normally there are only pipes sticking out of the walls, but no fridge, stove, oven, cabinets, etc.... We brought our kitchen from Ancona to Verona. The problem was that the apartment we moved into had a sink built into the kitchen. We already had a sink built into our previous cabinets. So, what that means is that we had to reconfigure our kitchen. This meant making one side smaller than it was before so it would fit on the wall and we added the section from that side to the other. Then we had to get new countertops and I had to install them after I installed the cabinets. Here are some pictures taken over a couple weeks of me installing the kitchen.

Getting To Know Verona

I just wrote a post on our Go Verona News blog....

April arrived a little over a week ago and we have gotten her moved into her new apartment. We are finally starting to get things set-up and stabilized here in our own apartment. As we have been getting settled you can imagine the numerous trips around town we have had to make. What that has done has shown us parts of the city that we may not have seen otherwise. It finally feels like we are getting to know the side streets. The streets that....(read more here)

Check out other team posts at the front page of Go Verona News found here:
http://www.goveronanews.com/

Conversational Relations

So how do you get to know people in a new city? We have had many different repairmen coming to the house to fix things that probably should have been fixed before we got the apartment. Since we have people coming to us, I have been taking the opportunity to converse with them. Every so often I come up with something specific to talk about, so that I have something to keep the conversation going. The past couple days I have been asking people about Lake Garda. It is a beautiful lake, or so we're told, that is only about 20-30 minutes to the west of Verona. Angie, April and I are going to head to Lake Garda this Saturday to celebrate Independence Day. We'll spend the day of the lake/beach and then return that evening home where we'll grill hamburgers and watch something patriotic. There are dozens upon dozens of cities surrounding the lake, so we have been asking which ones are the best. It depends they say. Do we want colder water that's clean? Or warmer water that is a bit more polluted? Lots of wind in the northern part of the lake, they say, that's why there's lots of sailing, wind surfing and parasailing. There are lots of great restaurants all around the lake. Our electrician told us we should head out between 7:30-8:00AM so that we get around all the traffic. Of course that is just regular traffic, since Italians don't celebrate the Fourth of July! From the suggestions so far, we have several options. I guess over time, we'll just have to try all of them and see which place will become "ours". Ours for going to the beach normally. Our version of a "lakelot" without actually having a "lot" on the lake.