Hi all,

Just a quick note to let you-all know we are back in Phoenix. The flight went fairly well, we got bumped up to business class (plus on the bulkhead, lots of room) for the London to Phoenix flight. A nice little blessing from God.

In case you haven’t read Cody’s log yet, on the last day we were in Bahrain, still waiting for a last-minute word that our visas were granted, we got a letter from the US Treasury. We had sent them a letter in May 2006 asking for a ruling on our plans to live and operate a business in Iran and this was a response to that letter.

The response letter outlined their ruling that our plan to live and work in Iran would be illegal and we should cease and desist immediately. How’s that for closure from God!

Naturally we are disappointed that we won’t be able to live and work there but we are also immensely thankful that God closed the door in a way that will allow us to move on and plan for the future without wondering if we gave up too soon.

So we are back in Arizona enjoying friends, family, and the low humidity. Debra and I are in the process of deciding the next thing to do, please join us as we pray for God to reveal the best plan.

We will be sending out a paper letter to you in the next few days with the latest information.

Jeff

Our communication about what’s going on has been lax and for this we apologize. We are living day to day with little understanding of what two days from now holds and that has left us very focused on the here and now and not on communicating what might or might not happen in the future. But that’s left people out of the loop. So for our short-sightedness we really do apologize.

Just to recap a little bit, we spent 45 days in Iran from the first of April to May16th. Despite repeated attempts to renew our 30 day visa or receive our 3 year residency visa we were told we needed to leave Iran in order to receive an extension. We were hoping to leave Iran with a code that would facilitate the return visa but unfortunately this didn’t happen. We were given a time estimate of 7-10 days in Bahrain in order to receive a new 30 day visa.

We decided that we needed to give this waiting period a more definite deadline because in our last waiting period, the 45 day estimate we received turned into six months. We have been living our lives in temporary mode for exactly one year (we packed up the majority of our belongings into a container last June and have “moved” five times ) and it has become draining in many aspects. We felt that 30 days was a fair amount of time to wait on this current visa, so we set the deadline for June 15^th.

To ensure availability and decent ticket prices, we purchased refundable plane tickets back to the States for June 15th. If our Iranian visas come through during this next week, we’ll cancel our flight to the States and head to Iran. If however we don’t hear anything we’ll be heading to the States to visit with friends and family and diligently pursue what our next steps should be.

We would definitely appreciate your prayers as we seek God’s guidance in all of this. God has given us wonderful experiences in Iran and new Iranian friends. He has put Iran on our hearts like never before. Just yesterday I was telling my Iranian friend here in Bahrain that regardless of where we go in the future we would love to interact with Iranians.

We trust that God has the best possible plan for us so pray that we will persevere through these uncertain times and be listening for His voice.

Debra