(This was written on our last traveling day, Tuesday .)

Welcome aboard, Uriah! We’d like to take a few minutes to show you around. Today is a beautiful day, with not too much wind, but you’ll still want to watch your step.

This is looking from the front of Uriah. I wish we’d taken a picture of Joseph as he took this picture. You’ll notice his recliner, on your left, is empty. That’s his spot.

Mom is the official navigator (notice the atlas in her lap). Everyone is sitting in their normal places, except for John. He goes back and forth between the jumpseat, which is up near Dad, or in Mom’s recliner, when she’s in the jumpseat, or various other places. Mom will often sit in the jumpseat, to keep Dad company.

Let’s step past our seating area, and you’ll see our little “kitchen”, or “pantry”. Our refrigerator door is held closed with a bungee cord due to its propensity to pop open when we make a curve. The microwave is secured as it sits on top of the fridge, and we’ve really enjoyed it on the trip! The taller boys have an easier reach than we girls . The shelves the boys built right beyond the fridge have been so useful; Mom has everything organized so that we have a lunch tub with our essentials, breakfast tub with food for the boys, and other misc. boxes and tubs.

Let’s step through the doorway, and you’ll see a set of shelves on the right side, and the first pair of bunkbeds on your left. The shelves hold many miscellaneous items; we added another set this trip, and I’m not sure what we did without them!

Round the slight corner, and you’ll see our hanging clothes.

To your right, is the last set of bunkbeds, and straight ahead is the restroom on board for your convenience (but the rest stops are preferred!).

Turning around to go back up front, here’s another view.

Finally, going back up front, looking toward the back, here are four of my wonderful brothers!

Thank you for stopping in to see around our metal tent .

Sarah for the rest

“Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you” (2 Thess. 3:1).

Walking out of the hotel in the dark this morning, Anna and I both thought how it felt and looked like winter. Soon, the bus was loaded for the last time this trip, and we were quickly on our way! After being gone 5 weeks, we are anxious to be home again, but oh, what wonderful memories we have of these past weeks. Truly, we love serving together as a family.

We just drove through Indianapolis, which is about nine hours from home. Lord willing, we should be back late afternoon.

Driving through Indianapolis

I-70 to Home!

Thank you so much for all of you who have been praying for our family during this trip. Time and time again we have felt those prayers. We’ve gone through a lot of traffic  (Uriah doesn’t have any marks to show for that ), we stayed quite healthy (only two had minor colds in the middle) until the end (and now several are quite miserable), we saw so many hearts open to the message, and much more!

This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
(Psalms 118:24)

Sarah for the rest of the family

We are now on our last weekend conference for this trip. We’ll report on that when the weekend is finished, but we want to give a quick overview of our last two conferences: Wednesday night in Plain City, and Thursday night in Flint, Michigan.

Plain City was another wonderful conference. Set up went smoothly, and several families had brought in a delicious dinner for us.

Often parents will be in the back of a session with a little one. Anna captured this moment (Notice the purple ruler on the floor near the little girl? She was playing with Mary's ruler.).

A surprise highlight for me was seeing a girl (Hi, Hannah!!) whom I occasionally write and who has liked the Moody books.  I enjoyed meeting her “in person”.

We drove several hours to Flint, Michigan, Thursday morning. The weather had cooled down, making it a much more pleasant drive . Michigan was the final state for we children to visit of the 48 continental states.

This photo was taken through the glass at the back of the sanctuary in Flint, MI.

Anna held a three-month old baby during part of a session, and I know she was thinking about being able to hold our little niece very soon. A special treat for our family was meeting our copy editor, who has done almost all of our books.

The children do a wonderful job working at the book tables.

A boy looking at his tracts from the Evangelism session.

We had our hardest border crossing yet today; we had the the paperwork ready, but it took about 45 minutes for the agency to process it, because several people were in line ahead of us. We were grateful we didn’t have a long drive, and we arrived here in Port Burwell mid-afternoon. More on the conference later!

For those of you who are waiting for those recipes posts, we will try to post the first one next week!

Sarah for the rest of the family

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3).

Our hearts are again full of gratefulness to our Lord Jesus for all that He continues to do in each conference. We’ll be doing a conference in the Columbus, Ohio area (Plain City to be exact) tonight.

Mom sharing with the ladies.

First Baptist Church of Lowell graciously opened their doors to our conference. Just a few weeks earlier, they had a flood, and they spent the last several weeks doing repairs and getting things ready for the conference.

Our conference coordinator and other ladies from her homeschool group made us an incredible Mexican meal! There was a sumptuous spread of food, even including homemade salsa (which we’ve been missing since our garden didn’t produce many tomatoes this year). One interesting bit of trivia was watching Mrs. G cook and bare handedly flip the tortillas over the gas burner of the church’s stove, and she didn’t burn herself!

Flipping the tortillas

Sisters with matching dresses .

Joseph giving Dad a shoulder rub after the conference.

A gift basket from last night.

It was a fast-paced evening, and it was wonderful to see the church filled with families going to their different sessions, people clustered in groups talking to each other, and hearts open to the message.

Joyfully His,
Sarah for the rest

Our family frequently stays in hotels while we travel. The hotel in Somerset, Kentucky, was the most friendly we have ever stayed in. The desk clerk helped us find where we needed to park the bus, let us use the hotel’s dryer when we asked how long the guest laundry dryers took to dry a load, voluntarily got a stack of extra towels when she heard the boys slept on the bus but came in to shower, offered for the boys to sleep on the sofas in the lobby if they were cold on the bus, and wanted us to practice our music in the breakfast room. She made us feel like we were at home.

There were three highlights of the Somerset conference for us. First, a friend of mine, whom I hadn’t seen for nine years, drove two hours to the conference with her husband and two of her sons. What a joy that was for me even though we had very little time to talk to each other. “A friend loveth at all times…” Proverbs 17:17

The second highlight was meeting a family who read about our family’s nursing-home church, and they have begun a church in an assisted-living home. They told us they now have such peace about their church and joy in it.

The third highlight was a man who came to Steve after the conference and talked for quite a while. Steve heard from him the next morning via e-mail, and he shared with Steve that his 51 inch beast (TV) was headed out of their home. “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes…” (Psalms 101:3) We regularly hear from families several months or years after a conference, and they tell us the impact the conference had on their family – changes the Lord Jesus was leading them to make. However, to have such immediate feedback involving that magnitude of change was a blessing to our hearts.

Speaking about conference feedback, we were just talking in the bus as we drove this morning about how many of our conferences this trip were coordinated by someone who had been to one of our conferences in the past. Seven out of the sixteen conferences on this trip fell into this category.

Talking after the conference

Anna and Mary talking after the conference.

Trusting in Jesus,
Teri