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!

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! 

Well, today I have completed 49 orbits around the Sun.  I’m not sure really why we measure our lives by that fact.  It is mostly used to judge us as “too young” or “too old” to be included in certain things.  As a child it mattered because there were generally privileges coming “when you are ten” that you couldn’t wait to get.  I guess it was a form of affirmation that your value was increasing and your personal liberty was growing.

Liberty is so important to the human soul. So is affirmation of worth.  So here’s to birthdays and what they mean in all our lives.  I start my next orbit grateful for the friendship circle that God has gathered around me.  I have soooooo many quality friends and family members.  Sherry is the perfect wife for me.  She understands me so well.  My children are all I could ever dream of them to be.  I love the work I have been called to do and the many Asian young men and women that have become our children as well.  All of this from the Father.  

Well, time to start my next orbit.  Gotta get to it.

Sherry got this shot as Brooke and I were leaving one village to continue exploring the mountain region for other tribal settlements.  It was a really special, slow family day, a good balance to the active travel schedule  we often keep.

Thanks for the prayer support for the girls’ trip to Laos.  It is a closed country so the trek was a bit sensitive.  They said that they could immediately see the difference in a village if even one person was a believer.  Without that little light villages were harsh in spirit and faces were stern and fixed.  One village they visited was the poorest, but the people had all come to faith and were so full of joy and hospitality.  Julia’s group took the trip on foot hiking mountain trails despite the leeches constantly attacking their legs.  Jessica and Brooke’s group took boats up the river interceding for another section of the country.

Please pray for the teen girls (Jessica, Brooke and Julia) as they journey quietly through Communist Laos on a prayer walk with their school.  Thanks!

Chuck and i love to do pre-marital counseling. We feel the Lord has taught us a lot about what to do and what NOT to do in order to build a great marriage. We want to invest into those lives that the Lord has put in our paths. We believe the Lord has put you in our lives for a purpose. Our marriage is the greatest and most important/significant earthly relationship we have! We must build it INTENTIONALLY……daily! Thank you for allowing us to pass on to you some of these nuggets of wealth the Lord has taught us over the years….

Number 1 of four marriage builders is….ENCOURAGE

We must be each others minister of encouragement……lets start our discussion by sharing some of the things we do to encourage our partner on a daily basis……

one of the things chuck and i do is….we call it…..our first encounter….. everytime we see each other for the first time after being apart we make sure it is a postive encounter. Whether it is when we first wake up in the am, whether we have parted just to drop the kids to school and back in 5 minutes or whether we have been apart for an 8 hour or more day, we make sure when we greet each other that it is a positive greeting. We may ourself have had an awful day…someone may have seen us when we dropped the kids off and gave us some really bad news or “jumped all over us” for something, we may have had a dream that our partner cheated on us(ever do that? :O) ….regardless of what has happened bad to us in that time we were apart we intentionally prepare ourself to greet our partner positively….then when the moment is “right” unload…but becareful not to make your partner the blame of why you are feeling so bad.

what is something you do to encourage your partner on a daily basis….. Sherry 

I wanted to video it but we were new to them and i didn’t want that to be the first impression they had of us. Only a video could do justice to the setting, though.  A small church building on top of a mountain that was a field of opium poppies just twenty years ago.  Now the opium has given way to tea plantations as the Akha have given way to Jesus as Lord.  The building was packed, and I mean packed. The men had the rugged clothing of mountain farmers and their skin was like leather from the sun and the wind.  The women were resplendent in their carefully embroidered clothing, red, yellow and green needlework on black clothing, leggings, belts, vests and most importantly their amazing headdresses (think Sioux chief with eagle feather head dresses, only theirs is made of silver and beads).  Everyone had bare feet, nobby feet from using them as tools.  About 1/4 of the women had a baby bundled in a sling on their back.  Women sat on the left side of the building unless there wasn’t room. In that case they sat on the men’s side too. It was a community, a tribe at worship.  Not much organization to it. Children were everywhere and everyone was talking while someone was trying to lead a song or read a scripture.  But there were men equal to the women (something i have seldom seen in churches) and they had tons of youth.  They let them lead some songs before church and they, of course, used electric “fuzzed out” guitars and a drum.  In the main service the elderly church planter’s wife played hymns which didn’t go over that well but there were a dozen people involved on the stage doing something in one hour of service.  After the two hour service they eat together. The body of Christ is so beautiful! From where I sat I could see my three little cherubs sitting in the midst of a middle aged woman decked in silver work, a young mother and a grandmother figure correcting the mom for over-disciplining her son. All the women wore traditional Akha clothing.  All of them are one in Christ because of the piano player and her soldier husband who got born again and began preaching the Akha villages in the mountains.  Six churches met throughout this valley today because of 30 years of faithfulness from these lay preachers.  Akha who had never heard the name of Jesus and who lived in bondage to mountain spirits and superstitions are now a thriving community within the Kingdom of God.

This has really been an amazing day for me regarding the web side of our life.  The new site allows us to see you and to get reconnected with your current happenings.  So many have written and many have also joined the site so they can add comments and photos and the like.  It feels like a community forming and we are so happy with that.  We know you individually, but most of you don’t know each other and that will also be amazing.  Our friendship circle contains some of the best people we have ever met in the world, really, I’m not just buttering you up.  Basically, we are “good people” scouts.  Sherry and I have spent our entire adult lives scanning the people we meet to spot the amazing ones with the great hearts.  When we see one of these jewels we pursue friendship with them and add them to our collection of meaningful relationships.  It has largely been our private treasure up till now, but now you have a chance to get to know each other as well as us so what a bonus.  We love you all and are very happy that the site redesign has allowed us to become reconnected with some that we haven’t heard from in a while.  Thanks for taking the time to write, post or join! 

One of my favorite ceremonies as a shepherd has always been at Christmas when the body gathers and we turn out all the lights in the large building.  Total blackness for a few minutes.  Then, the hiss of a match and one candle is lit.  It is amazing the powerful light of even one birthday-sized candle in a really dark room.  Then that candle lights another and within two minutes the whole place is bathed in warm, orange light.  I am deeply grateful for the work I have been called to do.  For the past 25 years or so, Sherry and I have had the privilege of being candle lighters.  We get to go light candles in dark places.  In rice fields, in cities, in hidden homes and on large stages we have been called to bring the light that we received and pass it on to others. However large the group and in whatever unique setting, the essential work is still the same–pass on the light that we have received to those who live in darkness.  No long classes.  Just light the candle.    In the darkness you can have things explained over and over with no comprehension, but once you get to “see” things you just get it.