Dear Friends, We have good news...we have received our passports and our visas and we have a scheduled time for TK, Jo and I to leave. (David will leave later in the month and we will let you know about that time later). We will be leaving on Wednesday morning and arriving in Okinawa on Thursday night. All seems to be in order and we are excited. We thank you for all your prayers in this longer than we anticipated process and we are looking forward to being able to share bits of what God is doing in Okinawa and anticipate that some of you may actually be able to see it first hand in the coming months and years. We still have things to take care of before we leave and David will have the bulk of closing up and getting our shipment ready. Please continue to keep us in your prayers. We would like to share with you a story we read today at a website for missionaries. It truly fits our situation and we hope it conveys to all of you our appreciation for you as our support in all we do. Thank you all for being our safety net--we will be in touch as soon as we get settled. Many blessings David and Leslie "This past Sunday, I was talking to a good friend who pilots his own biplane. We were talking about some recent tragedies at nearby air shows and I asked him if he was ever scared when flying "loop the loops" and other stunts. His answer? He quoted a highly-respected flying instructor who once told him to start every trick '10 mistakes high.' I'm sure I looked confused, because he went on to explain that if the trick required 100' vertical feet, the instructor wanted him to start it at 1000'. I thought about that for a long time afterward. I've concluded that missionaries are more like stunt pilots than trapeze artists. We don't really have the luxury of a safety net. But we *do* have a band of prayer warriors and supporters that can help us survive a long nose dive. For every difficult task we tackle, we need 10 supporters and prayer partners to make sure we can survive. Only then can we be assured of surviving every mistake." David and Leslie serve in Okinawa, Japan under the auspices of the American Baptist International Ministries. To contact them personally, please use turley@attglobal.net - Feel free to forward this email to those interested. If you wish to be removed from this list, please reply to this e–mail and ask to be removed. – Nancy Adkins, MPT