Happy Christmas 2012

Christmas Greetings   
        from the Paschkes,
                                        to all our family and friends. 


Just wanted to say Hi to everyone, and thanks to many for your Christmas letters.

We always enjoy reading the news of the year from our friends, and keeping up to date with how everyone is going.

We are actually back in Adelaide (Mount Barker) at the moment and have been enjoying Christmas with our extended family.  It was great to be able to spend three full days with Chewie (Lyndell's brother) and Kaz and their five kids, after four years of not seeing each other. They have just returned from PNG, and are now on their way to Nth Qld where they will be living.
 

Jon's sisters and family will be joining us for Christmas Day, along with Allen and Val (Lyndell's mum and dad) who have also travelled over to Adelaide from Melbourne.

We are planning on returning to Vanuatu mid-January. 

But the purpose of this brief blog is just to wish you all a blessed Christmas season, and we especially trust that you will have some time to reflect and be thankful for the best gift of all - Jesus, given for each of us.


Much love and many blessings,
  from Jon and Lyndell, Ben and Joel.

Jon cracks the big 50 !

Recently Jon travelled to a Scripture Union conference in Malaysia, and just 24 hours after returning from overseas, it was time to mark his 50^th birthday.  Jon had said before he left that he wasn’t wanting a big party, coz he wasn’t a ‘party man’ (he would be more than happy to go to someone else’s party, but has always said that he doesn’t need his own party).  However, we felt that the occasion was certainly worth at least a small acknowledgement. 

Accordingly the boys and I made a quiet plan to invite over a couple of Jon’s long-time Vanuatu friends for a family kakae at our home on the night of 13^th November.  Previously, we had only let on to him that we had invited Netty and her husband and their two little girls to come over to share a “laplap sosor” for the evening meal. (An all-time favourite meal of Jon’s.)  

As the night went on, a few more friends just happened to ‘turn up’.  And ... it turned out to be a lovely evening catching up with friends whom we don’t necessarily see all that often, even though we all live in the same town. 

 

It was fun too that we could use our new home to offer hospitality to others and host this group of 25 people with enough space for people to sit around on the mat enjoying the laplap and others relaxing and chatting outside the house or on the verandah.

We weren’t able to find birthday candles for the birthday chocolate cake, but the colourful chewing gums were still enjoyed by all the kids who were there!

 

 

The oldest member of our Vanuatu family was Pastor Leinamau’s mother (in her 70s) and the youngest was Yolanda Yosef (Netty’s second daughter), at 8 months old.

Congratulations Jon (and dad)! 

Lots of love from Lyndell, Ben & Joel