Road Trip: 4th Stop and Final Destination

Well, after leaving Vegas and driving nearly 13 hours (plus losing an hour to time zones) we arrived at Covenant Village Retirement Community in the greater Denver, CO area. My sister Katie is the National Marketing Director for Covenant Retirement Communities so arranged for us to spend a night there and I must say, if I were to retire, I would seriously consider Covenant Village Colorado because what we saw of it was great! However, we really just crashed that night, got up the next morning and drove the last hour or so to Palmer Lake where we checked into the retreat center that we will be staying at for the next 5 weeks. Our room is wonderful, and the people we've been meeting here are not only very cool, they have also been immediately encouraging to us as they've shared their stories about how God has called and is still calling them to international missionary work.

Throughout our 5 weeks here we will work through 2 training sessions. The first is a two week course to help us develop techniques for learning another language. So far it has been phonetics training to help us learn about how sounds are created and to expose us to language sounds outside of the 44 that exist in English. While the day can get a bit long (6 hours of class each day) it is fascinating and we are really looking forward to all that we will learn. The instructors have a great presence up front and clearly have a command over their subjects. The second training will be a course in cross-cultural sensitivity and general missionary training. While we don't know too much about it yet, we do know that it will be 3 weeks long and we are very excited for it!

We hope to have more pictures and stories up soon so stay close. Hopefully we'll post about every other day while we're here so if you haven't signed up for email alerts yet, do it! Also, we are online and have our cell phones so drop us a line. We do have a room number but it may be just as easy for you to call us on our cell. We can get mail too if you mail it to:

Scott and Kelly Hampton
C/O MTI
PO Box 1220
Palmer Lake, CO 80133

We miss you dearly but God is good and we are definitely in the right place! Please continue to pray for:

1) Our finances. Currently we are about $650 per month short of our goal. We are confident that God will provide but could use your prayer in asking that we would know how to best participate in the creative ways that God will show His provision.

2) Our experience here in Colorado. We have already felt such encouragement from the folks we've met here and we are so confident that we will learn a ton but ask for discipline in our studies and a closeness to each other and God through this training.

Cheers,
S&K