Jim and Jamie, NOT Jim and Tammy

Photo from sbno.illicitohio.com

For the first time since 1991, unless I'm mistaken, I just mentioned "personal support" in a monthly email update. I hate to do that more than anything, but Jim and I felt that people would want to know if we have a need. Ugh.

Surely people won't be turned off by my mentioning it every twenty years or so, right?

This makes me think of a true story that happened back in 1987, shortly after the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal broke in the news. We were in need of our first video projector to show the recently dubbed "Jesus Movie" in the Mam language of San Juan Ostuncalco, Guatemala. We wrote our home church, asking if they would consider taking this on as a missions project.

We tried to be humorous by assuring them that "Jim and Jamie" were not anything like "Jim and Tammy" - adding that we actually had very little furniture and no appliances except a stove. All we needed was a video projector. The church did raise funds for us -- not for the video projector, but for our first refrigerator. They thought it was pitiful that we were "doing without" such a necessity.

The truth is that our house was so cold (8000 plus feet above sea level) that leftovers stayed plenty cold in the windowsill. We chose to go to market every day for our food so we would be forced to practice using the language we were learning. Eventually we did get a new video projector, one of those huge old clunkers that were hard to carry out to villages, even on a donkey.

Nowadays the video projectors fit neatly in a small backpack! We've come a long way.

We're still living simply, but we do have all the appliances we need.

You might also like: The Hideous House about life before we had a washing machine, and The Simple Life