Jones Clips - Back in the US

Keeping Up With The Joneses - May 2023

Article in UK women's Christian magazine - some clarifications included

https://www.womanalive.co.uk/my-son-got-five-siblings-one-for-every-year-he-prayed/15156.article

Clockwise from top: Isaac, Will, Marcie, Seth, Gracie, David

Jemimah did a fantastic job on this article of our crazy, grace-saturated story! In the UK it's published in an actual hard-copy magazine. I wish they sold it in PNG so I could get a copy! They don't ship out of the country. 

There are a couple of details that aren't exactly right, but it was my fault in the interview for not clarifying. 

It was 8, not 9, years (thank God) before we had a successful pregnancy.

Also, my miscarriage was before my ectopic rupture by 4 weeks - it was twins, one in uterus, one in fallopian tube, which later ruptured. 

We didn't go back to the USA to do fertility treatments, but we did take advantage of our regularly-scheduled furlough - after a solid three-year stint in PNG - to try to conceive and then prevent a miscarriage. My body wasn't doing well on its own!

Gracie and Marcie (not Seth) were the two smallest, but Marcie was only half-an-ounce smaller than Seth. The problem was that he came out after Marcie, and he was a "wimpy white boy," as they say in the NICU. [White baby boys do the worst for some reason. Will and David were great, overall, but last-born boy Seth not so much.] 

Gavin does indeed do wonderful, needful medical flying, but his primary role is flying Bible translators and church planters in and out of the bush. 💕

Spring Break!

 Life has been so full-on (in a good way)! I am finally posting some photos. We just returned from our last family trip with Isaac in PNG. It was a wonderful one, and we're grateful his friend Kori could join us.We drove down the Lae and then took a quick bout trip up the coast to near Salamaua Island. [Lae is where Amelia Earhart last was seen alive. She took off from the Lae airstrip. Salamaua and Lae are also WWII battle sites.]

Everyone had a GREAT time and I know the kids will be begging to go again when we return to PNG after our upcoming furlough. We leave PNG June 7th. Isaac starts college mid-August.  

The water is SO warm!

Our boat captain inserted himself when he saw we were doing a selfie. 😄

Getting close to our destination!

A quick playtime on the beach. Lae is behind us, not visible from this distance.

A 20-minute walk to the waterfall

David daring to jump with his Daddy's and guide's help. All of us but Gracie jumped into the deep part.

Gavin and me - it was surprisingly cold but felt amazing after the heat

Gavin and David

Happy and heading home

 

Blessed Christmas and New Year from PNG!

Love from our family to yours!

Gavin made the kids special individualized boxes.

Some of our holiday adventures:

Gavin took the kids on a hike starting over this bridge near us!

Exploring a broken down excavator down the road.

Helicopter adventures, starting with fueling up. There was space when taking Bible translators out to their language allocations!

A roughly made shelter on a recent hike

They make friends wherever they go! This is the security guard and an unknown woman taking a smoke break at our favorite restaurant on the coast, where we spent four days a couple of weeks ago. 

Keeping Up With The Joneses - November 2022

The hard and the good

 Many of you know that we had a 7.8 earthquake several weeks ago. It threw me for a loop, even though we didn't lose anything of tremendous importance and were all fine. It was just such an emotional and mental shakeup, as well as a spiritual one - in the best way. It took a couple of weeks to get feeling more normal, although even now I think, "Do we really want to bother putting that decoration up or repainting the house (which so desperately needs it) when it could all be gone tomorrow?" It really felt like the world was ending for about 30 seconds. This broken, evil earth is not our home; one day everything will be shaken, destroyed and made new! 

Our friends Zach and Cassidy Cann lost their whole house. Gavin and his colleague helped fly them out of their incredibly remote village location on a rugged peak.

Zach Cann

For us, the biggest adjustment was to the lack of reliable Internet. The 2 submarine fiber cables were severely damaged in 3 areas each. Large ships are working on repairing them but it may be at least another month before they're fixed! So Internet (including email) has been spotty. 

Gavin loves helping with projects when he's overnighting in villages.

A local store. Our kitchen was pretty bad but nowhere near like this!

Recent violence between clans has also touched us deeply. Our oldest PNG man friend and yard man was hacked to death. Our house help, his wife, who's like a grandmother to our kids, hasn't been able to come back for weeks due to the violence threatened against her clan by the other clan. PLEASE PRAY for peace and for justice. We realize it won't ever be complete, and what these people (and all of us!) need is truly the Gospel. They have no hope apart from the Good News of a Savior for their sin. Their hopelessness and lack of true joy is blatantly obvious, and the outworking of the despair and rage is tragic beyond words. Please especially pray for the true Christians here to be courageous, stand up to evil, be protected and most of all be LIGHT in the darkness. We love these precious people. 

The kids have had fun exploring our beautiful land.

David scaling the river bank

Seth's turn scaling the steep bank.

Gracie with a fish a PNG boy caught, I fried and Marcie ate.

Will and our new kitten, Binni

Marcie with moth friend