Limoux.

We had a great trip to Limoux. We picked up the rental car (an Opel Zafira - 7 passenger) Friday evening. We took the chance to take a couple of language school mothers shopping. Almost all the language school students do not own a car so when one of us have one everyone likes to be able to pick up some stuff from the store that you don't want to have to haul back. We left Saturday morning for Limoux. It only took us about nine hours to make the drive. Andrew got car sick twice (his expressions is - "I'm hot"). Other than that the trip went real well. The car got excellent gas mileage, it was diesel and cruising at 75 MPH (130 km /h) it got 42 miles to the gallon (5.5 liters per 100 km). The rental house was wonderful. About 5 km outside of Limoux, it had a nice yard with a creek running behind it, it was spacious inside with 4 bedrooms and a fireplace. Sunday we went to church in Carcassonne (about 25 km away) at the Èglise Évangélique Baptiste. We gave a ride to one of the members who lived in Limoux. The services went well and we had a meal afterwards. Lilia was excited because there were two girls there about her age. The meal was excellent, we ate salad, soup, rice, quiche, bread, cheese, dessert. The conversation was excellent and very informative. We made it home and rested the rest of the evening. Monday we went back to Carcassonne to get some more minutes for our cell phone, but they were closed. We stopped by McDonald's and got the kids lunch and checked the e-mail. Back in Limoux we went to the office of tourism and got a lot of good information. Tuesday we went shopping and checked out prices and picked up some things. The prices are significantly lower than in Paris and they have a good foreign foods section which sells Dr. Pepper among other things. Tuesday afternoon I visited with another pastor from Carcassonne and one of his members from Limoux. Keep in mind all of these conversations were in French, good practice but exhausting. Wednesday, Angie went out with the young lady we picked up for Church. They had a good visit and afterwards Angie stopped by a couple of Realtors and found out among other things that the rent is about half of what we are paying in Paris. While Angie was gone I was playing outside with the kids enjoying the southern France weather, when a couple stopped by, Jehovah Witnesses, what are the odds. I visited with them for about 20 minutes and learned some good information. Wednesday night we had a couple that we met last July over for Supper. They are a really nice couple, retired from Belgium. We had a really good visit with them, we picked up some new words for sure. Thursday, we took the kids to see a dinosaur and hat museum. We had a really good time, the kids loved all the dinosaurs. Some of the dinosaur bones came from Texas. That afternoon we visited with the young lady and her roommate at our home. They are musicians and we had a good visit and stressed the need for more workers in Limoux. Talking from the other pastors, I learned that they work several small villages in the area during the week as well. One pastor had a Bible study in a different village every day of the week, all started by word of mouth. Angie and I both fell sure that this is were God wants us to work. We came back Friday without problems other then Caleb who was car sick (his key word "my mouth hurts"). Thanks for the prayers for us during this trip. Enjoy the pictures (1- our car, 2- T-rex, 3-giant scorpion, 4-the road into Limoux), I will post more in the Future. God Bless, JASON

Vacation time again.

Finished with the school and tests for at least a week. Now we are preparing for our trip to the south, where it is 10 degrees warmer and the sun is shinning. Join us in praying for this trip that God would make his will evident. We are deciding if God is calling us to work in Limoux or if he has another place in mind. That is he purpose of a survey trip. We made a survey trip to Paris for two weeks, prior to our start of raising support, just as we are making a trip to Limoux. These trips can be expensive, but they are well worth the money. What we discovered on the trip to France several years ago, saved us a lot of time and trouble as well as money. If we would have come without the trip it would have been a lot more difficult. After the survey trip we could have decided that France was not what God had in mind for us, if we would have moved here and then figured that out, it would have been a much larger expense. That is why this trip to Limoux is important. We plan on visiting with some local pastors, checking into prices and availability of housing. Visiting and outreaching to some locals, and praying. I may not have the time or Internet connection to update, but I will let you know how things turn out. I will attach a video I found that I liked, it would make a good church skit. God bless, JASON

Homophone.

Homophone - it is not an insult (I guess it could be). It is words that have the same sound but different meanings. Examples: to,two,too or they're,their,there. There are A LOT of these in French. This is due to the fact that French is a romance language (more vowel based) and the end of words are not usually pronounced. Here is one for your. All these words have the same pronunciation.
Vers = line or Verse
Vert = Green
Verre = Glass
Ver = worm
Verre = Drink
Vers = towards

ANOTHER EXAMPLE with a verb
voie - first and third person singular subjunctive of voir (to see)
la voie - way, route
voient - third person plural indicative and subjunctive[/link] of voir
voies - second person singular subjunctive of voir
vois - first and second person singular indicative of voir
voit - third person singular indicative of voir
la voix - voice

On the bright side there are a lot of possibilities for "play on words", but au contraire it makes it harder for those learning the language to grasp which meaning to use when we hear it. God bless, JASON

After the Tests

The week-end went well. I had a couple of interesting experiences. The first was I had to return and stuffed animal to Cora. Angie had bought it but when she got home she noticed that it was not on the receipt. So, I took it back and had to explain to several people before I got it resoved. I just wanted to pay for it. Later, I went to another store in a similar situation. A student at the language school asked us me to go along to help translate. Their child had stolen a small toy and needed to apologize and pay for it. I hope that it was the concept that the security guard had trouble understanding and not my french. We got the grades back from our tests last week. I am extremely happy that Angie and I made the same grade on one test. On all the rest she did better than me by a half to one and a half points. Also today our teacher gave us a work in french and said it was very similar to the word in English. We had no idea what word she was talking about, even when she gave it in English. In French it is "autarcie" in English it is "autarky". It means to be self sufficient. Let me also give another quote that Micah threw out last night. He suddenly says, "I wish I had a big head." I am attaching a video that I made tonight with Lilia (off Camera) singing the Model Prayer in French (view on my youtube page). God bless, JASON

Le jour de Saint Valentine.

We finished a busy week, due mainly to tests. There was a test Tuesday over concession and consequence. Something I had never thought of was that there are different French words translated as "however", "nevertheless", "in spite of", and "yet". They have the same significance but each can only be used in a certain grammatical order. Tuesday's test did not have a word bank, which was a first. So we had to remember all the different phrases by memory and make sentences with them, 10 different words to express cause, 6 for consequence, 3 for concession and 3 for another one that I can't remember at this moment. Thursday we had a mid semester test which took two days. Thursday morning we did the grammar part and Friday we did reading and oral. For Friday we had to answer questions over dialogues the teacher would play for us, and then we had to give a three minute speech about a subject with the teacher and then she would ask questions. We only had ten minutes to prepare. Other than tests, we received two packages from our church this week. This morning I did work on our taxes and got caught up on email. This evening, Angie and I are going to watch the movie "Fireproof" from the makers of "Facing the Giants". It arrived in one of the packages from our church. Attached picture is of the flowers I bought Angie this morning, and a picture of a picture taken when we left our wedding (still have birdseed attached to us). God bless, JASON

Rain all day.

It has rained all day today. I don't mind the rain usually, but after walking four miles in it you do end up wet. The weekend was good. I traveled by bus and train and visited a church on the East side of Paris. Enjoyed a good sermon Sunday evening from our home Church. I don't think I have mentioned that our sending church's services are broadcast over the Internet through the local radio station you can go to this link http://www.khbrhillsboro.com/ and click "listen online" to enjoy the sermon and worship. It comes on 11 am central time which for those foreigners is 5pm - Greenwich time (GMT). School has started back up and going. We have a test tomorrow, but that means no homework tonight otherwise. Today we spent another hour (several over the past few weeks) distinguishing between two "u" sounds. It is difficult because one of the sounds doesn't exist in English. For those phonetically trained the two sounds are [y] (like if you were saying "stupid" - "steeeewpid") and [u] (all the other u sounds in English like "boo"). They are hard to say and to hear, and of course they can make a big difference in the meaning of a phrase. Tomorrow evening there is a "spectacle" at the language school, they will eat crepes and learn a dance from the northern "Breton" part of France. I graciously volunteered to stay home with the kids so Angie can go. I'm sure she will have a great time as I probably would have had a slightly lesser good time. Attached is a picture of me giving a sermon in French at the language school. God bless, JASON

Hotdogs

We have had a good weekend so far. Friday we picked Lilia and Caleb up from school and let them play on a playground close by while we waited to go get Micah. Micah still stays 45 minutes after school on Thursday and Friday to work with his teacher and several other classmates on French. It has helped just the other day he thought of a word in french and could not come up with the English. That was a first. When he did arrive after school we continued to let them play because it was a little warmer than normal and we thought that some exercise would be good. Suddenly Micah claimed to need to go to the bathroom, one that could not be handled outdoors. Another family had stayed with us to let their kids play while I helped one of them prepare for his scripture reading that he had coming up at the language school. They offered to let Micah come over and use their restroom since they lived closer than we did. They ended up inviting us over for supper (hotdogs (my favorite) and hamburgers). Micah never did use the restroom. But now he has in his mind to conveniently need to use the restroom next Friday. We had a wonderful visit. We always ask about how the couple meet and ended up together. It is always a interesting story, and of course we share ours with them. We made it home late but it was a fun evening. It worked out well that the kids got a little exercises because today it snowed and sleeted almost all for most of the day. Thankfully it was not cold enough to let it stick. I am planning to go visit another church in the morning, a church of a French pastor I met through facebook. He visited in our home a few months ago and I would like to see him again and the weather is supposed to be better tomorrow. God bless, JASON

SUperbowl and Beyond

We had a good weekend, followed by a good week so far. Services went well Sunday. We kept the nursery and it went well. We did get to meet a lot of parents and practice basic phrases with the kids. I caught the Superbowl Sunday night (late). It was a good time even thought I would have preferred for the Cardinals to win. There were very few commercials and the commentators had to spend a lot of time talking. They made several mistakes when quoting statistics that they had to go back and fix as well as some technical problems. After the game I noticed it was snowing and by morning we had a couple of inches accumulated. It didn't last the day, but the kids enjoyed the walk to school a good deal more. We had a lot of homework to do on Wednesday as well as a long train ride and visit with a couple of missionaries with Greater Europe Mission. We had a good visit. It was nice to ride out of the city even though it was just for a few hours. I am really looking forward to our trip to the south of France at the end of this month. Please join us in praying that God will lead us and bless us during this trip with a greater knowledge of what he wants for our future here and where he wants us to start our church plant. I have also attached a picture of the snow, I snapped after the Superbowl out our window. JASON