Big Week!

This is a momentous week in the life of the Verner family! Sunday was Stephen's last day of full-time employment. As you may already know, for the last 3 years he has worked as a lighting designer at our church, which meant that he served at all 4 of our weekend services every week. While it was something he loved to do, it has been challenging to raise our missions support because he worked every Saturday and Sunday. Going forward, Stephen will continue to work at the church, but only part-time -3 days during the week. This will leave our weekends free to travel to speak at churches or meet with people to share about the need in Italy, so that we can raise the remaining support required for us to get to the mission field.

On Monday night, we were honored to host TEAM Italy's field leader, Gene Coleman, and his wife Susan, in our home! Gene and Susan have been missionaries in Italy for 28 years! We had the pleasure of meeting them about a year ago on our vision trip, when they opened up their home for us to stay with them. We were glad to be able to return the favor!

The Colemans came bearing gifts from Italy for our kids - a toy Ferrari (in red, of course!) for Bryson and a beautiful Pinocchio coloring book with the story written in Italian for Laynie. Gene even read part of it for us in Italian and then translated the rest into English. The kids absolutely loved meeting them and even got the chance to ask some questions about life in Italy! Stephen and I so enjoyed the fellowship and wise counsel that they shared! Seeing them again was such a wonderful reminder of what the future holds for us and made us even more determined to get to the field!

To end the week, in a few days our family will move from the apartment complex we have called "home" for almost 4 years. God brought us to this place to do apartment ministry (which we did from 2007-2009) and it holds a lot of memories and special friendships. However, a few months ago, the Lord made it clear that it's time to take the next step of faith in this process. In order for Stephen to be able to step down from full-time employment, we needed to get our monthly expenses down. Since our lease was about to be up, the couple that took over the apartment ministry after we stepped down has offered to let us rent their house for a very affordable price, which was an amazing answer to prayer! On Saturday, we'll pack up our stuff (what's left of it) and make the move to our temporary home! We feel so blessed and are looking forward to getting settled in before embarking on a summer full of sharing the story about our call to reach Italians with the Gospel!