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April 2008
Dear Friends,
A lot has happened here since I wrote last month. While on the way to a meeting of Nomad believers I had a kidney stone - that was quite an adventure! Not long after that I took a five-day trip to a remote area in the "Nomad heartland" and had a great week of ministry in an untouched area, hiking through the mountains and sharing the message. That was quite an adventure too. And recently I was detained and questioned by the police for several hours - my longest ever questioning since I came to India (everything turned out ok though). That was definitely an adventure! But all these adventures will have to wait for a future newsletter, because this email is devoted to telling you about the biggest adventure of all. I'm getting married!
At the end of last month my girlfriend Erin came to visit me here in India. On the second day of her trip we went to see the Taj Mahal, which is only a few hours from Delhi. As we walked around the monument in the morning I explained to her with a bit of a sly grin that the Taj is known as the world's greatest monument to love; it was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz, about 400 years ago. We toured the site in the morning, walked around town a bit, and by late afternoon we just happened to end up in a park right across the river from the Taj. As the sun set, I pulled out a gift from my backpack and gave it to Erin, a book that I'd made her about the story of our relationship, with pictures and quotes from our emails. She read through it and came to one of the last pages, which was mostly blank, save for brief instructions that the card that goes in that spot is below her. It took her a few minutes, but eventually she found the card that I'd hidden a few days earlier right where we were sitting. :-) I read the card to her, then she turned the last page in the book and saw the ring I'd put in there. I got down on one knee and asked her if she would marry me and she said yes!
Erin has been a wonderful gift from the Lord and I'm so thankful I get to marry my best friend! She's an amazing, beautiful seeker of God and we have so much fun when we're together. We plan to get married sometime this fall (don't have an exact date yet), and then return to Asia after a bit of time in the US. We're not yet sure where exactly we'll end up; we do want to stay with our organization,
but we may decide to move to somewhere that's new for both of us.
Please pray for us as we prepare for marriage and a future life of ministry together. Thanks for your partnership in my ministry, which for many of you has been over the last four or five years. Now you'll be partnering with both of us and I look forward to introducing you to Erin!
I've included a few pictures from our engagement. The photo with the Taj Mahal was taken in the park where we got engaged, shortly before I asked her.
Yours in Christ,
Jimmy
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