the stewarts…

• loving life
• swim lessons
• ballet
• arthur & melissa long weekend in port elizabeth
• beginning to think about our trip to America at the end of November
• healing
• hopefulness

The Latest on Laura

How am I doing?

I’m doing pretty well, overall!  I think we all feel the fact that we only have 2 months left… I had my first leaving-NCSA dream last night (and woke up crying!)… It was very tragic, actually.  I’ve said this maybe a hundred times to a hundred(+) different people, but– this year has flown by for me, which I didn’t expect!  Before coming, 10 months sounded so long and I wondered how I could make it that long without family & friends from home, and my fairly comfy American life… But now we wonder, “Where did the time go?!” And as we get closer to the end, momentum continues picking up and things only feel busier & faster.

My ministry at the Lerato House is going well; I only wish I could spend more time there.  There are some girls from Germany who are working there every day for a year, and I have to say I envy them a bit– they get to be a part of these girls’ day-to-day lives for longer than I will.  Today I took some of the girls to their weekly hip-hop class at School of Creative Arts (part of TLF), danced with them and had a blast!

We’re also in the midst of the Life Compass process, which has been good– it really synthesizes our life experiences (timelines we’ve each put together), all the personality/gifts/strengths inventories we took earlier this year, values, interests, passions, influential people in our lives and much much more.  We get feedback from our community on our natural gifts & abilities, spiritual gifts and personality traits (which, for many of us, was both an affirming and painful process!).  We look, from many aspects & angles, at the ways God has wired us and discern/ craft a vision statement for our lives based on all this.  I’m excited for the culmination of this process… chances are, you’ll see vision statements popping up on our blogs in the next week or two!

a young family living in community

For the past three months, our family has been interning with Nieu Communities in South Africa.  Part of our time within the internship has been dedicated to finding a healthy balance for our family.  Having come from pretty hectic and unbalanced ministry lives in the States, the community wanted to help us find balance and health inside a healthy ministry context.  It has now been three months since we arrived, and we are seeing tremendous growth in our marriage and in our kids.  Our time here has been a crucial launching pad for ministry into South Africa.

Roger’s update

I’ve been back at Pangani for a week-and-a-half and it’s been great! Cape Town was a superb experience, although I was only able to hook up with the apprentices twice. Seeing my sister Lyndi (and her fiance – my future brother-in-law – Andre) ahead of her wedding there in October was fantastic – and she let me sleep on her living room floor – thanks Lynd! I was doing a training course – NLP Master Practitioner through AHT - and managed to learn lots of things about myself which has some life-changing consequences.

One of them is that I’m awake at 7am today processing my tasks and getting ready for the day. I think all of the NC people (especially Amanda!) are kinda amazed at this new development – none more than me! Turns out I had the following beliefs:

• You’re not allowed to enjoy what you do
• Nothing is worth getting out of bed in the morning for

Changing these has been fun! I find myself more at peace and more able to engage with community and relationships. Hooray!