This weekend will not be an ordinary Family Day Weekend for us. Should be quite extraordinary, actually.

Naomi and I are preparing to attend a special evangelistic event for the next three days. Moved by their shared desire to share the gospel with others, a group of local business people have banded together to fund an evangelism conference. They have rented a local Christian camp, hired child care, arranged for performing artist Paul Brandt to perform, donated door prizes, and more to create an opportunity to invite people to hear the gospel message being preached. They wanted a way to have non-believing business associates, coworkers, employees, and friends and family to get away from the distractions of life and have a family retreat on the long weekend and hear this message.

The event is called No Ordinary Weekend.

The message will be in the form of a new book series John Cross has been working on. The No Ordinary Series takes some of the content he has previously written, and reworked it into smaller bite sizes of around 45 pages each. “No Ordinary Book” starts off explaining what makes the Bible unique and why someone should study it, and the remaining 8 booklets explain the Gospel message. These books will be a great Sunday School or small group curriculum.

For this weekend, these books had to be handmade for this event as they are not quite ready for publication. Expect further announcements about these in the coming months.
In the meantime, visit noordinaryweekend.com for more details about this event.

This is the first time presenting these resources and the first time doing a weekend retreat like this. Please be praying for John Cross as he teaches through these new books and the rest of the activities. We are anticipating around 100 or more unbelievers aged 13+ to be in attendance, and we hope to see many come to a clear understanding of the Gospel.

Troy & Naomi

Home.
That word is kinda magical, isn’t it?

After six and a half weeks, and 16,026 km (9958 miles) of travel, we are so thankful to have finally made it back home.

Since our last email update, we left the Maritimes, visited some family in Connecticut, saw both the Ark and Creation Museums and a total eclipse while driving across the US of A, finally arriving at that special little place we call home.

When we left for our epic road trip, school had just gotten out, crops were growing and canola was in bloom. We returned with only a couple weeks before school starts again and the crops are being harvested!

If we averaged, say, 90km an hour (mostly highway driving, but lots of slower stuff too) then that would mean roughly 178 hours or 7.4 days in the van during the course of the trip.

We are also thankful we didn’t have any major mechanical problems with the van or trailer during the trip. The last couple days, the trailer’s brakes did stop working, but thankfully we were past the really hilly parts of the journey.

We have kept a diary with lots of pictures of our trip on our family blog.
Trip east: www.troyandnaomi.com/2017/07/epic-road-trip-ab-to-nb/
Around the Maritimes: www.troyandnaomi.com/2017/07/epic-road-trip-around-the-maritimes/
Trip west, heading back home: www.troyandnaomi.com/2017/08/epic-road-trip-there-and-back-again/

We were so thankful to be able to complete the whole trip, including the total solar eclipse. I’ve been fascinated by space and astronomy since I was a little boy, and despite having seen several partial eclipses, this was my first total eclipse.

In short, it was awesome, and I don’t use that word lightly. There is a reason that the wonders of the skies prompted King David to write:

We made it!

Not only was the eclipse strangely beautiful, just the thought of what it takes for a total eclipse to occur points to a Divine Creator. A total eclipse probably shouldn’t happen. I say “probably” because the probability is too small. After all, we are the only known planet that has a moon just the right size and distance to provide a perfect total solar eclipse where the moon just barely covers the sun, allowing the viewer to see the corona and prominences. It also happens to be the only place where there is someone to see it.

The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but it is also 400 times closer, making them roughly the same apparent size in our sky, depending on eccentricities of the orbits. This has allowed us to discover so much about the sun, moon, our own planet and the universe long before we had the technology of modern telescopes and spacecraft. If the size of the sun or moon, or the distance to the moon and sun were off even a bit, a perfect total eclipse would not be possible. Yet, perfect total solar eclipses happen because of this perfect combination. This alone should give us pause as we watch in wonder. But not only are they astounding and awe-inspiring for this fact alone, total eclipses are strange and beautiful and they are wonderful to experience!

I have too much to add for this email, so to see our pictures and video of the experience, head over to www.troyandnaomi.com/2017/08/eclipse-the-shortest-2-minutes-and-22-seconds-of-my-life/

As for my health, the bouts of vertigo and dizziness were a challenge almost every day of the trip. Thank you so much for your prayers for us!

This calendar shows a red x whenever it was a big problem for us.

That is 28 out of 47 days of our trip. This certainly made some parts of our trip much more difficult. Naomi had to do most of the 16,000 km of driving, as well as more work with the kids. I’m so thankful for my wife, who is loving and patient. The problems became a bit more manageable after the first three weeks of travel, but were still pretty debilitating, often requiring at least a few hours of laying down somewhere or trying to sleep in the van. Despite this, we were still able to do many of the big things we had planned to do, including speaking at three churches, but were not able to have as many visits with people.

Yesterday I had another appointment at the Neuro-vestibular Clinic in Calgary where we talked it over for almost an hour with a specialist. We are going to change some medication and try to treat this as a vestibular migraine.

At least having my own bed to sleep in should help me get some rest!

Speaking of rest, did I mention that it was good to be home?

“There, now you can breathe like you haven’t in years!”

Said the doctor after pulling out stents and cleaning up the sinuses.

And it was true!

The surgery and recovery were much better than expected. Of course, I was asleep during the sinus surgery, but I did not have any of the swelling, bruising or pain that we had expected! Nor did any of the other potential complications manifest themselves, such as loss of smell, blindness, leaking brain fluid…

Recovery was uncomfortable (there was lots of bleeding and plastic stents up there!) but was otherwise good. It was actually a great time to slow down. The second day after surgery was a lovely spring Saturday. Naomi and the kids were doing road-side cleanup as a fundraiser for the school and I had the house to myself on the first really nice, warm weekend of the year. Since I had no choice but go slow, I took a theology book out to the deck and read in the sun! It was nice to see buds opening up around the yard as I checked on our foodscaping. The apple trees, cherries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, haskaps, currants, saskatoons, grapes…. all the leaves starting to open and some actually blooming was quite lovely. Couldn’t smell anything of course, but very nice to see.

On Tuesday, Naomi drove me down for the post-op appointment where the doctor cleaned things up and inspected his handiwork. Everything was healing up fine.
Prior to this surgery, I have had quite restricted breathing through my sinuses for a very long time, with frequent sinus infections for several weeks a year. Anything more than a leisurely walk and I would need to breathe through my mouth as I simply couldn’t get enough air. Suddenly, now I can breathe through my nose easily. It is like having a cast removed and you have a sense of freedom! Ok, over-dramatic, but it is a huge relief to just breathe. I have another follow-up appointment in a couple weeks, and would appreciate your prayers. Hopefully this will mean less illness in the future.

While the sinus issues are getting cleared up, I am still dealing with frequent bouts of dizziness and the last three weeks have been pretty wobbly. I’m actually having a bit of a hard time reading the screen as I write this, so I’m going to sit here awhile instead of trying to walk. The doctor at the Vestibular Clinic in Calgary thinks that the vertigo may be induced by a migraine. I had never heard of this before, but instead of the more common stabbing pain, some people have migraines that manifest themselves with vertigo, called a vestibular migraine. Anyway, I am keeping the clinic up to date with what I am experiencing and doing more research on this as well.

Again, thank you for your prayers.

Troy & Naomi