Visa Date Set

This is LAST YEAR'S picture of when we got our official renewal of our visa. As you can tell, we were happy!! We had gone through a lot, spent a lot of time and money to get the opportunity to stay another year in Hungary. We got our renewal in mid-March 2005.

Even though it's just January 25, now is the time to get all our paperwork in and set our appointment to go in and submit the paper work at the immigration office. Then it usually takes about a month to hear back to see if we are renewed. We found out today that our immigration office appointment has been set for Tuesday afternoon, February 7th. There's a chance that that appointment will be changed to Thursday, February 9th. Since BSF is on Tuesdays, it really would be easier to do it on a Thursday. But we're not complaining! Whatever it takes to get in there and get things going.

If you think about us in the next few days, please pray for this appointment to go well and for all our paperwork to be in order. Because of some different things we did this time, we hopefully won't have to wait a month to hear back and hopefully we'll get a 2 year renewal instead of a 1 year renewal.

We'll keep you posted on the progress and maybe we'll do another picture of the 4 of us holding our passports that are stamped with a brand NEW visa!

Praise Team

We attend Danube International Church here in Budapest. (www.danubechurch.org) Our pastor is Ronnie Stevens. He originally pastored a church in Memphis but has been on the mission field for several years. We are blessed to have him pastor this church. Up until recently, Ronnie was the only paid staff we had. In the last couple of months, we have benefited from an Executive Pastor who feels called to make Danube Church his missionary service. Translate: he doesn't get paid by the church! This is a totally different situation for us since we come from a church that has several paid staff positions and each staffer is trained for his/her particular position.

Here at Danube Church, we have no worship leader. The worship team changes from week to week. We have several gifted volunteers in our church who agree to head up one week a month and be in charge for worship that day. Makes for interesting worship! Olivia and Meredith, for the last 2 Sundays, were asked to be a part of the praise team for that week. They seemed to really enjoy that! Coming home from church today, they mentioned what a blessing it was to look out and see people really worshipping the Lord through the music. It's a different perspective looking out to the audience instead of being IN the audience. Maybe they'll have some more opportunities in the future to be a part of the praise team.

Some Prayer Requests and General Info

1)We now have a newsletter that Bible Study Fellowship sends out for us. The newsletter is also posted on their website: www.bsfinternational.org The newsletter comes out about once a quarter. If you would like to be a prayer partner with us, you can access that newsletter on the website or you can email us and we can put you on the mailing list.

2)Did you know that the girls also have a personal blogsite? Here are the addresses for their site:

www.oliviabrannon.blogspot.com
www.meredithbrannon.blogspot.com

3)You can email us at either of these two addresses:

brannons@scsonline.com
shaybrannon@hotmail.com

4) Here are some current prayer requests:
*Smooth process for our visa renewal. We are due to be renewed in March and have already started the process to get our visa renewed. Please pray that we will get at least 2 years of renewal.
*Pray for new leadership in the ladies' BSF class. We have a great need for a children's leader.
*Safety for Curt and our two guests from the states as they go to Serbia next week. Two men from First Bible Church will arrive next week to go with him to explore mission opportunities.

Happy 50th Anniversary

Today is the 50th wedding anniversary of Shay's parents. That's them standing next to Curt. David and Carolyn Beach were married on January 15th, 1956, in Trussville, Alabama. They have 4 children. Although the Brannons couldn't be there, a family luncheon was held today in Birmingham in their honor. Family from Arizona and Chicago joined in the celebration. Being married 50 years is quite an accomplishment in this day and age! We congratulate them and send our love. Wish we could be there to help you celebrate!

Turkey and Dressing

Yep! That's the title of this blog. Shay actually cooked a Thanksgiving/Christmas meal last night for dinner. We had turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, orange fluff, and rolls. Not the most nutritional meal in the world but it was good! What's so unique about this meal is it's just now happening. It's been almost 2 months since Thanksgiving and 3 weeks since Christmas. That's usually when you have the traditional turkey meal. But with so much going on and such hectic schedules, this is the first chance we've had to have turkey and dressing! The "bird" has been in the freezer. So we thawed "him" out for a couple of days. Then, we made cornbread for the cornbread dressing. The dressing is what takes so long. The meal seemed to be a success and we've got turkey for leftovers. We'll just have to pull out those recipes that you usually see around Thanksgiving that shows you how to use up your leftovers. Oh well, better late than never! Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy 2006!

Is it really 2006 already? It's hard to believe that it's a new year and we've started back into our regular schedule. Homeschooling for the girls started back yesterday. Also, BSF began again with our first leader's meeting of the new year. We had our first class of 2006 today. There's just something about a new year to make you think of new beginnings and fresh starts. A clean slate with a new year stretched out before us. What will we write on that slate? More importantly, what will God write on that clean slate? Maybe all of us need a clean slate in order to re-order our thinking and to examine our hearts.

We would love to hear from you in 2006. It's so very interesting to us to hear what's going on in your life and the life of your family! It reminds us that life is still going on back in the USA despite the fact that we're on the other side of the ocean. At times, we tend to think of everyone as being in the same spot that they were when we saw them a few months ago. Obviously, that's not the case! So, when you write and tell us the everyday things of your life, we feel that maybe we're not missing out on so much after all.

This will be our official blogsite now and a place, if you desire, for you to check out what's going on with us and what our latest prayer requests are. Also, our sending organization, Bible Study Fellowship, now has our current newsletter posted on their website. That website is:
www.bsfinternational.org You can go to that site and click on Foreign Resident Ambassadors. Then click on our name under EUROPE.

Blessings to all of you and may 2006 be a year filled with spiritual triumphs!