If I had it to do all over again …

Someone once said, “If I had it to do all over again, I’d be too tired.” That is certainly true of the past few weeks here at Radio HRGS. We hosted Ken and Karen Anderson for two and a half weeks. Overlapping them was a team from the states to re-shingle the Silseth’s roof. They were wonderful too, and we all had a glorious time. But I don’t think Mildred or I could have maintained that schedule for another day.

I have already related many of our adventures with the Andersons. Karen was a huge help by cooking for the roofing team while Mildred pulled extra duty covering for me in the studios so I could ricochet back and forth between Ken and the roofers. Ken and Karen stayed in our third bedroom. Besides inspecting our AM tower on Utila and helping with other jobs over there, helping bring down our old FM tower here and recovering the antenna bays and cables, Ken was able to check off quite a few smaller jobs that were on my punch list.

Our roof-replacing friends had to be housed a little creatively. Sam Schmidt and Dan Weigand from Wisconsin stayed in the little one-room apartment attached to the Silseth’s house. Joe Brittingham, who volunteers regularly at our mission’s home office near Tampa, bunked in our old spare bedroom, which is more of a sewing and tool storage room. He said he slept well, though. We could not have asked for better guests than these five people. Still, it is great to at last have some time to ourselves and try to return to some sort of a routine. Ken and Karen headed home yesterday, and I took the others to the airport this morning.

In addition to the roofing and other projects this week, Mildred and I had two gracious invitations that took quite a chunk out of our available time for work and rest. Sometimes it’s a real challenge to balance “work ministry” and “social ministry,” and that has been more true than usual with Peter and Sandi gone and the extra projects going on these past few weeks. These were invitations that we could not escape gracefully, and if not for our work load, they would have been much more welcome. Even though we had a great time with our hosts, my mind was never far from the tasks that were piling up here at the station.

Dr. Solomon and his wife Aminta invited us and the Andersons to go to lunch with them at Parrot Tree Plantation, one of the resorts up island from us. We all had a great time, but Mildred and I had to drive separately from the others and get back to work after lunch, so we were unable to join the Andersons and Solomons as they went on up to Oak Ridge to visit some of our friends up there. That was on Tuesday. Then on Thursday, our dear friend Miss Jennie Bodden invited us and the Andersons to her house for conch soup. I had tried conch soup before and, not being a real fan of shell fish – or soup in general for that matter – didn’t care for what I had tasted on that first sampling. Well, everyone says that Miss Jennie makes the best conch soup on the island, so I strapped on my missionary stomach and gave it a go. I obviously haven’t tried all the conch soups on the island, but I would not be surprised if they are right. That was delicious! She gave me much more than I thought I would want, but I slurped that down in no time flat and then ate about half of Mildred’s. The missionary stomach was totally unnecessary.

Now that the dust is settling a little here, we have a big backlog of things we have been neglecting. I have to try to get caught up on writing scripts for Verse by Verse, track down a problem with our electrical generator that is draining the battery, make some improvements to the system that sends our signal from the studio to the transmitter site and write a prayer letter to up-date all our supporters and friends. The list goes on, but those are the most pressing items. I hope you’ll pray that the Lord gives us good health, abundant energy, and patience with each other and everyone else. We expect Jim and Karen Avella to arrive on September 8. They will stay in the Silseth’s house and we are sure looking forward to their help over the next three months. Here is a photo gallery of some of the week’s events and activities.

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