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Meeting Place

February 18, 2013

I get a real kick sometimes when I try and visualize our home church in Michigan operating in the same way as church in the village does. Trying to combine the two distinctly different atmospheres always leaves me in inward stitches! I can just imagine for instance, people arriving and choosing to sit on the […]

Dirt Roads

February 9, 2013

Before I left the US I shared the following statistic many times: In 2004, only 5% of the roads in My Country were paved. That’s the latest I knew and I didn’t know what to expect when I got here. From what I’ve seen around town, it looks like that percentage has gone way up […]

John 13:7

February 5, 2013

Yesterday I was reading in John 13. I came across John 13:7 and thought that it summed things up here quite well. It says, “Jesus replied, ‘You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.’” Sometimes I feel like everyone I meet here could tell me that multiple times a […]

“…Without LOVE I Am Nothing…”

February 3, 2013

A few weeks ago we began teaching about love from chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians. The Simbari church has been slowly working their way teaching through the whole book of 1st Corinthians. It’s been encouraging to see their slow but steady growth from being under consistent teaching of the Word of God. By way of […]

Same But Different, Part 2

January 31, 2013

Same: The other day we had spaghetti and meat sauce for lunch. It came complete with a spaghetti claw (if that’s what you call the spoon thing you use to get spaghetti out of the pot with). The tomato sauce even had ground beef in it, which is the only time so far that I’ve […]

Linguistics Crash Course!

January 30, 2013

Enjoy a laugh from this short clip from Singin’ in the Rain: Now imagine we have recently moved in among a people group and we are learning language. We have just observed these two ladies saying what seem to be the same words, but using different sounds to say them (they each said their “t” […]

Do you know who won?

January 27, 2013

Do you know who won the recent soccer game? It was My Country!! Even though I wasn’t in front of the television for the whole soccer game I could tell each time that they made a goal, since the neighborhood went wild. The game was thousands of miles away, but with each goal it sounded […]

Shadowing Jude

January 26, 2013

The best way I have found to slow Jude down while on a walk through our village is to make him wear shoes. 🙂 Only while his feet are constrained to civilized attire will he actually WALK with me (as opposed to run) as we visit our friends here. Life is like that for Jude-full […]

I’m leaving on a jet plane

January 17, 2013

Four days until takeoff. Just think – by Tuesday I’ll be experiencing the 90s and sunny. And lots of French. And different sights, sounds, and smells, that will likely become “normal” after a while. I think that it’s such a big transition that I can’t even understand it from this side of the ocean. That’s […]

Commissioning and Going Away Open House

January 16, 2013

Since I’m planning on leaving on Monday for My Country, this last Sunday was a special one at church. But since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are a few pictures so you can see what went on: