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I’ve added several new
pictures. You can see them from the
main journal page or by clicking
here.
I’m writing this portion on
Saturday night late but, due to the internet café not opening until later
Sunday afternoon, you will not see it until after church.
We just received some bad
(not terrible) news. Daniel, with
the Baptist Seminary, called to say that the restaurant had booked a wedding
reception for Monday and we had to be out by 12 noon. I really hoped to have at least a 12:30
if not 1:00pm ending time. One thing
this will force me to do is be better prepared to present the requirements
for the committees. I will have very
little time to communicate a lot of information and to get a chairman for
each group and a cross committee member for each group.
I thought that we would visit
the internet café again tonight so that I could print off the 7 pages of
sermon notes but Shadrach and Jeremiah were late finishing with the
teachers. Then I thought I would
have to hand write the pages (besides the amount of writing, my handwriting
leaves something to be desired). But
Shadrach came to the rescue with a Lexmark printer that he had which was
out of black ink. So we used red,
which turned out to be brown, to print the pages. It’s hard to explain the frustrations
that people here go through for the very simplest of things. A new black ink cartridge here is
$40US. That’s just astronomical in
comparison to the average wage. We
sent two all-in-one printers over (they cost $90 each with full sized black
and color ink cartridges) and we also purchased several ink refill kits
which brings the cost to refill a cartridge down to approximately $4
each. That results in the ability
for the school to print their school papers in a more affordable
manner. Shadrach would still like to
find a manual mimeograph machine for the Village but I didn’t have much
luck finding one.
It’s been a long 20 days since
I left my family and it will be 4 more before I see them again (except my
oldest daughter, Rebekah, who has left for her final semester of college
during my absence. I normally get
homesick for my family toward the end of these trips but this time has been
especially difficult. I’ve never
felt as close to Gayla as I have this last year. It seems the more my relationship with
Christ develops the more my relationship with my family benefits. Four more days and I will see them.
In regards to the above, I
would ask that you pray that I will not lose focus at this critical
juncture. The formation meeting on
Monday is the culmination of two plus weeks of incredible favor from
God. It would be sinful to let up
now just when the handoff of responsibility is due to occur. Several of the scriptures I used in last
night’s sermon spoke about Jesus having finished (completed) the work that
the father had for Him. I really
want to finish strong in this part of the project. Pray for each of the committee members,
I’ll try to get them listed completely by Monday afternoon, as God works
through their life to bring about this incredibly important training.
I should be able to report on
the Sunday service at Commission Baptist by the time I actually post this
on the internet.
All the preceding was written
last night. This morning I awoke
with the generator still running.
Since I hadn’t looked at my watch yet I thought I had slept for a
couple of hours and then woken up.
Actually it was 5am so I have had a full night’s sleep. As I lay there thinking about things I
felt the need to prepare some more for tomorrow’s meeting. Given the shortened time I will need to
have the presentation under good control.
So, since the generator was still running, I turned on the computer
and began to take the Crown City Set-up Manual and pull out the pertinent
items for the committee (much of the items listed had already been
accomplished). This lead to some
questions about speaker travel schedules, etc. so I queued up some emails
to the STS/Crown folks that will go out at the same time I post this
update.
I would ask you to pray that
a spirit of selflessness would prevail among the committee members in their
interaction with each other and the use of the budget amount (nearly $10,000). It is important that God receive the
glory for everything that is being done and that the goals for the
conference be fully met. We are
responsible to be good stewards of this money, these people and the
time. God is responsible for the
results.
People are stirring around
now (it’s almost 7:00) and we’ll be preparing to attend Sunday school at 10
and worship at 11. Boy, I sure hope
the preacher doesn’t “go long” today.
Well, so much for hoping the
pastor would be short. We arrived at
a little after 10am and caught most of the Sunday school time. It was about money (these poor people will
be tired of talking about money by the time the day is done). Church was supposed to start at 11:00 but
SS didn’t finish until 11:15. Soon
the children’s choir came in and they were absolutely precious. They had matching skirts, pants, shirts
and the girls had matching scarves and hats while the boys had hand made
bowties out of the same material as the girls’ scarves. They did a nice job. It was good to see Rhoda again as we’ve
had her around on both of our previous trips. She’s getting married at the end of
October. The singing and
announcements took a while and I was released to preach about 12:45. I finished about 1:45pm. Boy do I owe some former pastors an
apology. There sermon was the first
in a series from the Crown Pastor’s Resource kit. You can see the outline on yesterday’s
journal page.
We’re gearing up for tomorrow’s
meeting with the two committees. Pray
that unity will be the overriding theme.
I’ll have more for you
tomorrow.
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