The news

The first week of my solo trip is nearly over, and I have had a great time.  The WASH forum went extremely well, and I will summarize my learning points soon.  For this post, I’d like to briefly share some of what is going on here, both good and bad.

Let’s start with the bad, so that you know it will end on a brighter note!

The bad news is that several of the brothers or believers are struggling through some difficult situations.  One of them has been caught lying to try to get ahead.  Another has claimed that he is experiencing persecution and needs money to move to another part of the country.  Friends that have been working with him more closely believe this is also a lie and attempt to get quick cash in order to pay a debt.  A third brother has been behaving badly in response to missing a job opportunity, again because of lies.  He is not owning this mistake, instead he is blaming the other brothers, and he has even threatened in anger to cause persecution to fall on those brothers.  All three of these situation (that are a bit interwoven) are very sad, and something to pray about for sure.

On to better news:

For the first 4 nights of my time here, I stayed in a house with several local staff, and we had some great discussions.  There were no believers among them, but as I suspected, being away from their home community and in a safe place with me, we had some unusual and interesting discussion.  One of them said that he has announced recently to the rest of the office staff that he will no longer pray, because he feels that god is not close to him at all.  Another one said that he was 20 years behind on his prayers, and he was not going to attempt to make up for that lost time.  These are just two examples of the interesting discussions we had, which I cannot go into with much more detail here.  It was very encouraging to spend those evenings with them; it was great to see that we do, in fact, as foreigners have quite a significant influence on the people that we work with over months and years.   Even people that act calloused and hard when we are in their home community and they are surrounded by such a culture of suspicion and conservatism, they soften up and reveal the influence we have had on them when we have some time away from home with them. 

Another exciting news was that I gained a positive friendship with one of the men I translated for over the course of the weeks’ meetings.  We had never met, but by the last day he trusted me enough to confess his faith to me, and ask me to remember his family in prayer.  I found something bold and powerful in his confession of faith, and hope and trust that his walk will be boosted by taking that courage.

Yet another encouragement from the past week was that scripture stories were shared during our meetings, and the spiritually-wide-ranged audience received them well.  Participants from a neighboring nation (where there is an acknowledged population of believers) included the story of the prodigal son, and one other parable, in their presentations on the ethics of our work.  Pray that those subtle messages can sink down deep in the hearts of those that needed to hear them.

The last news for today might be considered good or bad, or perhaps an opportunity for either.  The talk among foreign teammates here is that the country to our west is going through a period of religious curiousity about end times.  Their leader has made some bold statements, which if carried out, would cause cataclysmic violence.  Apparently this has caused the public there to press their religious leaders with eschatological questions, and that has become a big theme in religious teaching.  This has filtered over the border to us here, where students and youth are asking foreigners these questions as well.   Like I said, is this good news or bad news?  Let’s pray it is opportunity for very good changes in the individuals who are inquiring.

That’s all the news for now, stay tuned…