Before I share about my day, the pictures are of the living room, kitchen, loft and girls’ room. There’s still a good deal of things that need to get done but you wouldn’t really know it looking at our house now.
Anyways, Monday November 12, the day I was hoping to dive back in to language study. My day started with organizing the mess that was my office. I needed that organized so I could get my language stuff organized and my thoughts organized. I figured an hour and I would be sitting down poring over my language flash cards or planning out my next steps for infusing my brain with Pal. A half hour into the mess and I realized I was going to need shelves in my office to even have a chance at getting everything organized. But, before I built shelves, I needed to paint the wall. So that’s what 9am found me doing. I painted just two walls in the office (the other two can wait for another time) and then proceeded to start on the shelves. As it turns out, skill saws are noisy and home-school disruptive. So when my wife politely asked that I wait for school to be over for the day I obliged and decided to finish some painting in some other parts of the house. 11:30am, when home-school released its prisoners, I went back to my shelves.
One hour later, I’m standing in the doorway of my office and the porch, and out of nowhere lightning struck. There was no warning – no previous thunder or lightning – and the sudden blinding flash had me reeling like a bomb was going off. The deafening boom of the thunder actually brought me back to my senses as my mind then registered what was happening. My wife and kids came running and we were quickly laughing and exclaiming over the lightning strike as the surge of adrenaline slowly passed. A few minutes later I realized our charge controller was blank. The lightning had zapped our electrical system.
After a couple phone calls with the New Tribe experts we found a fuse that had melted. A few minutes later our system was up and running again. I’ll probably need to change out some of the surge suppressors too but we’re glad that’s all that needs fixing. Our coworkers, whose house is about a 100 feet from ours, had a fuse melted too. We’re not sure exactly where the lightning hit – maybe both our houses, maybe somewhere in between – but it was close enough to affect both our systems.
After we got our electrical system up and running again I went back to my shelves. By the end of the day my office looked clean and organized and a place where I could work. Now, after a 2 month and 2 week ‘break’, I’m ready to begin Pal language study again.
Pray that we would progress quickly in the language. Next year, Lord willing, will see our literacy program begin in Pal and the following year Bible teaching begin. But, a lot of that depends on us reaching a capable-high competency in the language fairly quick. Pray for good health and perseverance. Pray that God would prepare the peoples’ hearts for His message.
