Okay update time.

I guess the biggest thing to publish which we didn’t before is that Andrea is pregnant! Hooray awesome news for us and all you potential babysitters. She is due to give birth around the beginning of April. I’m going to be a dad! A lot of people will know this already but we didn’t want to publicise is till we had told certain people in person.

Our time here will be ending in February after God told me, on the Tuscany TOM week, that we were to head to the UK then and stay there. We had intended to head back to the UK then for the birth and I presumed that we would be heading back to Sicily after that but God has told me otherwise. This is both exciting and sad for us.

As some of you will know we had a couple of weeks in the UK recently which were fantastic. We saw family and friends and I had the honour of gate crashing Jason Ede’s stag do where we had some chilly swimming under a waterfall in the Lake district, coming back here to Sicily and swimming in the warm sea was much better!

A massive thank you to Ronnie for driving us from Sheffield to Stansted to catch the flight to Palermo. There we were picked up by Cinzia’s mother – Adele – and another guy from the church and they drove us the three hours to Catania. We arrived very tired.

All of our furniture and heavier items were left on Marco and Cinzia’s balcony in Rome for the removal people to pick up. However the day before they were due to pick everything up Marco rang them to make sure everything was okay and it basically wasn’t they tried to extract an extra €600 (on top of €1400) for the trip so Marco hired a van and brought a full load up the morning after we arrived (a 15 hour drive). I then accompanied Marco back to Rome in the van which we left and hired a MPV which I filled up with more stuff and drove back. I set off at about 9pm and crashed out in a service station lay-by at about midnight to be awoken rudely at about 3am by a couple of guys banging hard on the windows demanding money. On the pretext of getting money out of my pocket I managed to get into a driving position and turned the engine on and drove off, very glad to nip in front of a convoy of lorries just before we went down to one lane for 20km. Praise God! I arrived about 8am and unloaded and Marco followed the following day in his car which had been left in Rome when he drove the van down.

So we have all of our stuff sorted and are dealing with the day to day issues that face us. As Marco has said we have initiated three times of prayer a day and are currently three quarters of our way through a 24 hour prayer day. This was a bit worrying as when we had started yesterday at 6pm there were only two people signed up apart from us four which meant that we were doing it all. Whilst praying about this in the second shift I felt like God saying “Have faith,” two hours later lots of other people had signed up and people who hadn’t signed up were coming too – fantastic. Praise God.

Other practical problems that we have had to face have been mysteriously vanishing water (2000 litres at a time) and currently a stench where we are living which we think is from dead mice in the wall cavities – a small thing but a real pain please pray for this.

We have just had some of the Hunt family for a visit – Josh, Liz, Rachel & Gareth along with Andy, Liz’s partner, as well as having Andrea's parents here. This has been great, and it was really nice showing them Etna and going swimming in the sea, and having a kind of break.

There is loads more that I could write but don’t want to bore you too much. Another prayer point is our computer which is still having problems – please pray that I can get this fixed, and thank you God that we now have internet access! Hooray.