Thanks to all of you who have joined the Quinley Tribe social network recently.  We hope this site will help us interact with you and help you know how to pray for us.  We also hope that you will enter blog entries, pics, and videos so we can know your world too.  You might also make an amazing friend on the site.  We know so many incredibly amazing and gifted people and we would love to be the connection that helps you all get to know each other as well.  We love our friends!

Well, only a day from our departure from sunny Jamaica Sherry tripped going down a small set of stairs (really small…like two steps).  Splatted face first on the tile floor and had a “blunt force trauma” to her nose and broke her big toe.  Crutches for a month and a cast.

We are to leave for South Africa in about four days so this will make travel to there…interesting.

Tomorrow I will officiate the wedding of my firstborn, Andrew, about 50 meters from the very spot where on the same college campus I first met Sherry.  It is wonderful how God has designed life to reproduce itself.  We do not survive, but life does.  It just keeps bursting forth. 

This past week I was doing some yard work and had to keep cutting down little hickory trees that just keep sprouting up everywhere, even in cracks in the concrete.  The earth is energized by the first breath of God and his command to live, be fruitful and multiply.

I praise you, Father, for the gift of life and for Zoe, real life, that comes into us through the quickening power of your Holy Spirit at the new birth!  And thank you Father, for allowing me to see the day when my children also begin to marry and have children of their own.  Celebrate with us friends! 

  I want to talk a bit about a concept I got from Dr. Donald Joy while working on my doctorate at Asbury. He says that we are all a trampoline and we need lots of relationships as springs to hold us up. When we move to a new place we lose all our springs and if we take our family with us, the family unit feels a real strain because the relationship work of support done formerly by dozens of people is now borne only by the family members who went with you.

In general the first order of business when you move to a new place is to rebuild the trampoline of relationships. You will need four kinds of relationships: (1) Casual relationships (nothing too deep, just people you know and say hi to on a daily basis) (2) Nuclear Family: the closest bonds in your life (3) Extended family (even if they are not blood kin you need old people like grandmas and mothers and also aunts and uncle types). You need a brother or a sister, a really satisfying same-sex friendship (4) Work relationships: people you gear up with to accomplish important things. We have moved four times as a family to an entirely new country/place.

This one insight has helped us get established in each location so we had a healthy relational web to support us in our ministry there. HOpe this is helpful to you.