I am traveling to Albuquerque on Saturday to spend a week meeting with folks, including some time encouraging a new family that will be moving to Mongolia this summer from the Duke City. After my time in Albuquerque is complete I’ll make a quick run back to Tucson to pack up for my return trip home to Mongolia.

I’ve been in the States for eight months, minus the three weeks I spent in Ulaanbaatar in January for Rochele’s wedding. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to getting back home, being with my wife and youngest daughter Whitney, and getting back to work.

About a month after I return to Mongolia I’ll be starting some distance education classes on Old Testament Studies through Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS). I’ve wanted to attend RTS for the last twelve years and this was the first year that my schedule and finances would permit it. Why am I taking seminary classes with RTS? To prepare for future ministry of course, and to augment my current ministry with Eagle TV.

During the last week my course materials have been arriving. Stacks of books, software, and audio lectures are sitting on the kitchen table waiting for packing day. Among the many books, almost half of them are for Hebrew studies. Needless to say, language isn’t one of my strong suits. Mongolian has been more than a little tough for this full-time working guy. I’ve no little trepidation about taking two classes in Hebrew. In 1993 I took six months of Arabic and did pretty well. I’m hoping that the magic will come back, so to speak, for the Hebrew studies. One of the things I enjoyed about Arabic was that is was a completely different animal from English, not just in sentence structure, but also the characters. There was something about that that actually helped my study. The characters can’t be confused with anything English, unlike Mongolian where an H is an N, and a P is an R, and so on. I’m hoping the same thing that happened to me with Arabic will also happen with Hebrew.

By the way, don’t ask me to translate anything from Arabic. I’ve lost almost everything I knew, which was just an elementary level anyway.

Looking forward to being in Albuquerque for a few days.