Prayer request

Certain issues have arisen with the local immigration department that may affect our future ministry.  Please pray for a quick resolution so that our ministry here may continue.  Thank you!

Trying to catch up here

Hey, folks: it's been ages since I posted anything - been really busy.  

I wrote the following on the 8th of this month (!), so I'll paste this up now and post more recent news directly.
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Tours, tours, tours!  We heard June is a busy month.  We must have a 100 people coming through here every week now.  They sure do enjoy themselves, so that's great.

We've been attending the Sunday morning services at Pusey House.  It's a bastion of high church Anglo-Catholicism, so there are some things we just put up with.  The folks are great; some are fellow Wycliffe Hall students.  I got to read the OT lesson recently, which was the first time I'd been able to do anything in a service since I got here.  I really appreciated being able to do that.  Yesterday they had a dinner in the "quad" after the service and I wound up having a conversation with two people who do not appear to know the Lord - one definitely does not.  It just underlined for me how important it is in these churches that they not get so philosophical and academic in their homilies that they fail to make the gospel call clear: repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  There are going to be people in those congregations who are there because of the beauty of the building and the music who really do not understand Christianity or their need of a personal Saviour.  Of course that's obvious, but the fact was so plainly there before me yesterday.

We are excited that our friend, The Rev. Victor Morgan, of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Blue Ridge, GA, is going to be in town next week.  Victor is an American representative of Wycliffe Hall, and every year he comes over here for the last week of Trinity term.  I have often wished I could come over to Oxford with him for a trip, but it never worked out.  Now I get to welcome him here instead.  

We've had to spend a lot of time recently learning how to deal with gallstones.  Yes, gallstones.  Two weeks ago yesterday, I had a classic, full-blown gallstone attack, spending a night in the emergency room.  I had been having symptoms for some time; I just didnt' know what they were.  Now we have to watch what I eat.  Of course, Sheila is enjoying fixing me all these salads she has been wishing I would eat for a long time!  :-)  We've got the symptoms under control and I will have an ultrasound tomorrow to have a look to see what's going on.  Once this confirms the diagnosis, we'll get rid of them. [update: the test did not reveal gallstones so we are quite puzzled about my symptoms. I'm taking a PPI for my stomach for a few weeks to see if that helps.  We'll go from there.]

The C. S. Lewis Foundation will be holding their two-week summer seminar in July.  We've been helping them get ready for that.  I've spent a lot of time this past week finding some mini-buses to rent.  Those will be two busy weeks.

Sheila's also been trying to make a few improvements.  She's getting some new door mats and she has been working on freshening up the linens in the house.  She is also planning a house dinner for our current scholars.  We are so happy that Dr. Laura Smit of Calvin College is back with us for a month.  We also have Jacob Imam, who is translating some ancient Greek papyri.  He's a godson of Walter Hooper and a really great guy.  I'm especially glad to have him around because he likes to help with the tours! [update: we now also have a lady from France who is a Thomas Hardy expert, working on C. S. Lewis.]

A great way to keep up with what's going on at The Kilns is to follow our twitter feed.  It's been dormant since 2012, but I've started it back up.  Search for @TheKilnsOxford.  I do "retweet" some of my posts to my Facebook page, but not all.