Hello, goodbye, and everything in between

Well this whole bit about it's being February is a bit much; seriously, where has January flown off to? (Listen to me, this is what I get for watching BBC productions with Karis the night before I blog.) However I'm glad my blogging as planned was delayed, because now I can enthusiastically exclaim, "I'm not the only person under 30 down here anymore!" Actually, I love all the older folks I work with. They are so rich in wisdom and insight and fascinating stories from the mission field, and besides, I have more aunts, uncles, and grandparents than ever before. But for Bridget's sake, I am quite glad I am here.

Bridget is about 27 and she is working at the mission for about 2 months in hopes of discerning God's direction towards or away from this sort of ministry. She came at an excellent time because three of our dedicated workers in the Madison Discipleship School have been out for health-related reasons and the resulting lesson backlog was becoming quite a burden on Bob Hearing, the school director. So while she originally came down to secretary for Bill Shade, she has willingly agreed to lend a hand grading lessons. Outside of work, she's made a marvelous addition to our social network. She loves discussing theology, social concerns from a Christian viewpoint, and general philosophy, which I absolutely love discussing and Karis enjoys listening to. Likewise, both Bridget and Karis are the ultimate old movie connesueirs, and I'm more than happy to enjoy their glee over knowing each other's favorite 40's actors and actresses and quoting the films they were in (I've put forth a worthy effort for the last six months, but I'm usually clueless and end up nodding and smiling and raising my eyebrows a lot).

The goodbye is in reference to the Spanish- the Spanish Basic Bible Truths and Soul Winning were sitting on my desk, pre-proofed and ready to be re-designed when I got back from PA. Thanks to the work I had done on the English BBT over November and December, the Spanish went together very quickly, the final proofing has also turned up very few errors, so that only one book is still out for proofing! Soul Winning proved to be a fun little 3 book series to re-work and without images, allowed me to play with text layout and font styling.

My next project is French, which is a beast of a different sort. It's the first language I've designed in that I have no formal knowledge of, and thankfully my fascination with etymology and the ability to look at the same lessons in English have kept me from feeling too lost. This is also the first time I've gotten to work on the young children's lessons, which are in a larger format with big, easily readable text. Storytime 1 is done and out for proofing and I'm making steady headway through Storytime 2- the greatest challenge has been re-constructing the previously English word puzzles and making them actually work in French. However, I'm greatly indebted to Beth, one of the designers at The Mailbox Club, who sent me the original files from the English Storytime 2 lessons, which have never been done in French before. Having the images has saved me countless hours. The speed at which these lessons are going together encourages me that the rest of French will flow rather seemlessly, as most of the work on the 1/2 page style courses has already been done in Spanish. So my theory on the productiveness of the second half of this year is holding water, I'm quite pleased!

Well, that's the situation here in Madison, thank you all for your prayers and interest, I enjoy reading about what's happening in PA on Facebook, but I'd always love a note too :)