Dear Friends,
It has been about three months since our last update, and once again a great deal has happened. When I last wrote, we were still in Mount Juliet, the basement torn up from the flood, and I was preparing to leave for an island I had visited but never lived on. I write this time from the manse in West Bay, Grand Cayman.
On the Island
I arrived in the middle of May. The people of Boatswain Bay Presbyterian Church have cared for us in humbling ways — they have given us a house and a car, and they have walked us patiently through the immigration process at every step. I preached my first Sunday in the pulpit on May 17. On Wednesday evenings we have begun working through Paul Miller’s Person of Jesus study, and in June we launched a new members’ class we are calling Discovering Boatswain Bay.
My aim this first year is simple: to listen, to learn, and to love these people before I presume to lead them anywhere. They met Vicki when we visited last October and, as is the custom everywhere we go, promptly liked her better than me.
Family News
We have an abundance of happy news. Within four days, two grandsons arrived. Vanja Dimitrije Lukić, Molly and Velo’s son, was born on May 29 in Tampa. Vicki reached Tampa the night before, pulling in at 11:10 worn out from the long drive — and twenty minutes later Molly’s water broke. Her timing, or rather the Lord’s, could not have been better. Then on June 2, eight days early, Michael Alan Graham III — “Trip” — was born to Michael Jr. and Mollee. Even Skippy played a part: Vicki’s cavapoo stayed with a sitter in Tampa so the Lukić household and its two longtime pets, Oliver and Reggie, could settle into the commotion of a newborn coming home.
The boys bring our grandchild count to five, with Mary Helen and XM expecting our sixth around Thanksgiving. And on June 20, Vicki’s mother, Phyllis, turned ninety. They threw a big party for her on Saturday — her house full of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and longtime friends of Amaw and Daddy Joe who were able to come and celebrate her. It was a milestone and a mercy.
Vicki and the In-Between
This is much of why Vicki is still in the States while I am here on the island. Her hands have been full in the best way — she was in Tampa to meet baby Vanja, this past weekend she was in Alabama for Phyllis’s ninetieth, and midweek she returns to Nashville to meet baby Trip and to finish the long work of getting the Mount Juliet house ready to list. I have been traveling too: I flew back to Tampa the week of June 11 to meet Vanja and to be with Vicki for her birthday, and once the house sells I plan to get to Mount Juliet to move out what remains and to meet Trip.
The separation is hard, but none of it has caught us off guard. We always knew the move would come in stages. Two things in particular keep Vicki in the States a while longer. The first is the house, which still has to be sold. The second is immigration: my current work permit is a temporary six-month one, the result of new laws that took effect here on May 1, and the next step is to convert it to a five-year permit and add Vicki as a dependent. Until the house is sold and that longer-term permit is in hand, we wait — and we are learning to wait well.
This is also why my installation service will not come until September. We have set it after Vacation Bible School, which the church hosts here each year together with a faithful team from Old Cutler Presbyterian in South Florida who come to the island to help; VBS falls in early August. We are praying that Vicki might arrive before VBS, Lord willing, so that we step into that next season together.
The House
The house has tested our patience. Over the last couple of months, severely heavy rains in Mount Juliet caused another water intrusion — and if the basement flood in our March letter taught us anything about helplessness driving us to Christ, the Lord apparently judged the lesson worth teaching twice. The good news is that the trouble surfaced something that truly needed repairing — far better to find it and fix it now than to leave it for whoever buys the house. We are getting it properly done, and the house is now almost ready to list, though it has taken far longer than we expected at every turn. We would ask your prayers that it finally goes on the market and that the right buyer comes at the right time.
The Writing Ministry — A Book Finished
The biggest news from the desk: the book is, for now, finished. When I last wrote I was halfway through chapter seven of the first draft and hoping to finish within a month. By God’s grace I completed that first draft of Discovering Dad: The Father I Wish I Had Known in early June, a full month ahead of where I dared to hope. I sent it to a handful of readers, took their honest input, and spent the last two weeks restructuring and tightening it into a third draft. I finished that draft on Father’s Day — a timing I can only call providential.
The book is built on the 297 handwritten letters my father wrote — from the University of Alabama, the Texas oil fields, and Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and then most of them from Korea in 1956 and 1957 — together with family interviews. It tries to do the one thing I set out to do: to know him better from his own story, as a way of honoring the father I wish I had known. It still needs a good editor’s hand. This is a book for both Christians and non-Christians — for anyone who has wrestled with a monolithic figure in their life and struggled to forgive. Because of that, I am not certain how to go about finding a publisher, which was not something I had to worry about with P&R when they published Cheer Up! This book is unlike anything I have written before, so I would value your prayers about how and where it might find its way into print.
As part of The Dayton Graham Project, I also plan to build a website of its own — a home for the family tree and timeline I have assembled, and a place to share updates as the writing continues.
The Jack Miller Project
The Jack Miller work continues alongside the pastoring, as it always has. I have done a great deal to rebuild the website at www.thejackmillerproject.com, where two things I only hoped for last time are now live: the A New Life app and an interactive timeline of Jack’s life and ministry. The site also carries my blog — at TheJackMillerProject.blog — which holds two streams of writing: my work on The Jack Miller Project, and the personal Bible-study reflections I put down from time to time.
That A New Life material is close to my heart in another way just now. I am preaching a series here at Boatswain Bay drawn largely from the A New Life booklet and from what years of studying and writing about Jack Miller have taught me about evangelism and the foundations of discipleship. I am praying about how that series might grow into my next writing project, both for me and for The Jack Miller Project, and I would be glad to have you pray about it with me. I am also still turning over that engagement on baptism at World Harvest Mission in the 1990s that I mentioned last time. And the vision for a Jack Miller Study Center has not faded; if anything, Grand Cayman makes it more imaginable.
Staying Connected
There are a couple of good ways to stay up to date. You can subscribe — free — on Substack at thejackmillerproject.substack.com, or follow the blog at TheJackMillerProject.blog. Everything lives on the main site at www.thejackmillerproject.com.
And please do not be a stranger. Even on island time, you can reach me the same as always — by WhatsApp or FaceTime at my usual U.S. number. I would love to hear from you.
Grace for the Long Haul
If a single thread runs through all of this — the house that has flooded twice, the permit we are waiting on, the book about a broken and beloved father — it is that God’s grace works on a longer clock than ours. Jack Miller said it better than I can:
“Some Christians would say that [we] overpromise what God’s grace can do to renew hurt, broken, and wicked people … Yes, let me acknowledge the working of God’s grace sometimes takes years to soak into our lives. Grace definitely is for the long haul and must overcome much resistance in our lives. But isn’t much of our problem right here? We tend to resist grace by underestimating what the Lord of grace has done and is doing for us. We minimize in our hearts what He has done in His work for us in His atonement and is now doing in us by the Spirit. So then the problem lies not so much with grace, but with our tendency to overestimate what we can do by our own moral willpower, and in this manner we hinder the Spirit of Christ by our unbelief.”
— Jack Miller
We are learning, slowly, not to underestimate that grace.
Thank you for walking with us through another season of change. Your prayers and encouragement mean more than we can say. We are settling into a good and unlikely place, and we mean it sincerely: come visit. We have a guest room and an island, and we would love to have you.
Love in Christ,
Mike and Vicki Graham
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