we bought a car!

when lance and i moved to taiwan we got rid of our cars. we'd each had our own cars since we were 16 years old. so it was really weird to move to taiwan and not have a car. when we arrived here we got scooters. boy, was that an adventure! traffic here is not quite like american traffic. there are lots of cars and even more scooters on the road. fact: there are more than 10 million scooters on the roads of taiwan. this tiny island has the record for the largest per capita scooter ownership in the world! that's a lot of scooters!

it took me about 4 months before i was ready to brave the hectic streets, but lance quickly jumped in with both feet! for the past 2+ years we have managed to travel the streets safely on our scooter. but with a baby on the way, we felt it was time to make a change in our mode of transportation. (altho you can see many taiwanese families all piled onto one scooter. it's quite a sight to see mom, dad, and 2 kids on a scooter!)

we started raising support in mid july by sending out letters to our individual supporters and churches. at our last report from our forwarding agent, we had $2,300! we are so blessed with such generous friends and family. at the beginning of september, we realized the birth of our baby was only a short few months away and we really needed to start car shopping.

first we talked about what we were looking for in a car: no more than 10 years old, no more than 70,000 miles, mid-sized (not too small, but not too big to fit easily into taiwan's small parking spaces) not pink (you wouldn't believe all the little pink cars here!), and around $3,000. we had planned that we would take whatever extra money we needed to purchase a car from our general team expansion fund.

it wasn't easy finding the right car for our family. we started our search with our friends Teacher Jang and her husband Peter. they gave us some websites that used car dealers use to advertise their cars. but we quickly learned the cars on the website were never at the dealerships. so Teacher Jang and Peter took us around to look at several places. in the end, the car we thought best suited our needs was the very first car they took us to look at. after a few trips to look at it, test drive it, talk about our budget, we finally purchased it!

it ended up costing us $3,400, but we just couldn't give up such a great car. it's a 2000 silver ford tierra with only around 40,000 miles. the previous owners didn't drive it very much because they often took their scooters to work. plus, it had been very well maintained so it was in great condition. we really believe this will be a great car for our family to safely travel the streets of taiwan! we can't wait to pick it up on tuesday!

thank you so much to everyone who helped us buy this car. without our wonderful churches and individual supporters, it wouldn't have been possible! (by the way, if you had been planning to give towards this need but hadn't yet, you can still send a check to our forwarding agent with "car fund" in the memo line.) praise God from whom ALL blessings flow!