A New Chapter

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The view from our new location

The sacrifices we parents undertake for our children often astound me. In my previous article I wrote about our children attending school at New Hope, a Kleine Gemeinde Mennonite mission school on the western edge of Spanish Lookout. Now that our children had been accepted the next big question was transportation. We debated between driving a total of 35 miles daily or sending them to school via bus. Not being a wealthy family, in the end we realized the most economical choice was to move closer to the school. Which we did and are now grateful for the proximity which enables us to be more readily available in case of an emergency and allows our children to be home at a much earlier hour, not to mention that my workplace is now also much closer.
  Honestly we did not want to move. We have property in our home community, family and friends; yet after a long and hard look we both arrived at the same conclusion. Although 35 miles might not seem like much, when you have a family of 7, suddenly every penny spent on fuel does matter, especially if 90% of those 35 miles are on a rough gravel road with steep hills and valleys and plenty of corners.

During heavy rains the shortcut lane floods. Fortunately there's a much better road to the north.

  Once or twice during the weeks long debate I even wondered silently if perhaps our children were really meant for this school. But then I reminded myself of our many prayers, our church brothers and sisters who had also prayed for us regarding this school, and I nodded my head firmly. God had led us to this school, He would also settle the issue of transportation. He did, and now we rejoice that we followed His lead.
  In fact, we are both so thankful that we have now made it a habit of planning the children’s lunches together and preparing breakfast together, just because we are so glad that we were both led to arrive at the same conclusion which simply meant that God was the One who had brought us here.


Crop dusters and other small planes fly directly over us daily due the location of the private airport; at first their roar was deafening, eventually we grew accustomed to it.




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   A. Mendoza

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