Encouragement

Hello!  I can’t tell you how full our hearts are right now.  Many of you have been following our journey from the beginning.  You may know about the problems we were having with our guards and houseworker.  Well, we believe that the turbulence from that area of our lives and ministry here is over.  We have one guard now and we are training a new houseworker that made excellent progress this week.  That has been a huge encouragement for us to have passed through one storm and made it to the other side.  We learned a great many things and thank God for the cultural experience.  Please pray for our ministry to our new houseworker.  She is not a believer and we understand the importance of walking out the love of God to her continually during the work week.

Also recently we hosted some future coworkers for a few days.  Our hearts were so greatly encouraged because of the time we got to spend with them.  One reason is because they complimented us over and over again on our Swahili ability at this point.  Although it’s not a formal evaluation, it was very encouraging to hear these compliments and it encouraged us to hit our studies even harder.  As a side note, both Amy and I feel very good about what we are able to comprehend now.  As is expected our ability to produce the language correctly is not as advanced, but we are making progress.  The plans are in motion to bring a language consultant here the first part of March for a formal evaluation.  Please pray that these plans continue in the best way for everyone involved (us, the consultant, and our language helper).

Our language helper and I got a couple of opportunities to discuss scripture.  He is a pastor with many years of bible study under his belt, so it was not like I was evangelizing him.  We were able to have some fairly deep and challenging discussions.  Although most of it was in English, not Swahili, it was very encouraging to broaden our relationship in that way and be encouraged by the truth of God’s Word across cultures and languages.  We talked about Acts 8-10 as well as the book of Job.

We have now been here for 11 months.  These past 11 months have been extremely challenging, and yet a completely blessed experience as we see God moving in ways that we have not experienced before.  It is clear to us, because of discussions that have popped up out of the blue, and because of some work on our part, that the door is opening for us to set up an ‘NTM-type organization’ here.  We still have a lot of work to do in order to even be ready to apply for registration, and we were told it truly helps to do it all in Swahili, but we are anxiously awaiting the day when we can register our own organization here.  Please pray that we get the language well and can apply for registration within a year from now.