Category: Other Page 89 of 181
By surrendering yourself totally to God’s purposes, He will bring you the most pleasure in this life and the next. Francis Chan
I just turned 36 on Saturday. It was a crazy busy sort of day; it was the Christmas Fair at HOPAC and I was in charge of the carnival games. So I was sorting through the supplies and points and tickets and schedules and coordinating teenagers to run the games and the couple hundred hyper kids who wanted to play them. I was so pre-occupied that I was startled any time anyone wished me a Happy Birthday.
That night we were to go out to my favorite Lebanese restaurant, and then found out that the traffic was horrific on Saturday (like 1-mile-per-hour kind of horrific, which happens every now and then in Dar). So I made my own birthday dinner. Dar es Salaam wins again. I would have been more upset if I wasn’t already used to this kind of thing happening so often.
Yet as I lay in bed that Saturday morning, thinking of all that was ahead of me, I couldn’t help but think that I am one of the most blessed people on this earth.
It’s not an easy life. Constant heat and power outages and crazy, crazy roads and inconveniences. Thursday I spent 5 hours searching stores for basic items for the Christmas Fair that could have been solved in one simple trip to Walmart. Spending Thanksgiving and Christmas away from our families….again. Recently there have been anxious situations going on at HOPAC that have kept me up at night.
There have been many days these last ten years when I have been so ready to be done. Days when I have cried with homesickness or frustration. Times when the criticism we have received has been intense. Times of conflict and exhaustion and guilt.
So why is it, that when I think back on all that has happened these last 10 years, I just feel completely overwhelmed with gratitude and joy?
Maybe because I live in a place where so many have so little.
Maybe because there’s nothing compared to living a life with meaning.
Maybe because the pain and tears and death and beauty and music in this life all make sense with Jesus Christ. Maybe because the hope of heaven is stronger than anything this life can throw at me.
There is an incalculable, faultless, eternal God who loves the frail beings He made with a crazy kind of love. Francis Chan
It’s worth it.
It’s worth it.
It’s worth it.
Risking it all, living a life that is not always safe, giving up what I was going to lose anyway….
It is all worth it.
Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. Tim Kizziar
I’ve missed a lot of friends’ weddings during the years we have lived here. So when my friend Carley announced that she would be getting married just a country away, instead of a continent away, I knew that I wanted to go.
Carley and I have been friends since 2005. She is, in fact, the only full-time teacher at HOPAC, besides us, who has stayed since 2005.
I have a huge respect and admiration for single women missionaries. The ratio of single women to men on the mission field is something like 30:1. Kind of pathetic, I know. But you can imagine the courage and faith that it takes for a single woman, who does desire to be married, to come and serve, especially for multiple years at a time.
Carley has served faithfully, creatively, and passionately as a single woman in Tanzania for 7 years (and more before that in China). She is one of the most joyful, positive people I know. She has poured her whole heart and soul into HOPAC and gave up every Friday night to Youth Group with us for the six years we ran it.
And now, God has blessed her with Victor, a Kenyan man who is on staff at the church where she attends. Inter-racial marriage can be complicated, but Carley and Victor have impressed everyone with how they have gone about their relationship with accountability, lots of wise counsel, and prayer. God has now given them both the desires of their hearts, exceedingly, abundantly.
During the ceremony, the minister said, “Victor, you must learn how to be the perfect American husband. And Carley, you must learn how to be the perfect Kenyan wife.”
Isn’t that what marriage is all about?
The fusion of two worlds, two continents, two cultures. I always cry at weddings, but this one was especially beautiful.
Such joy.
To God be the Glory!
(name that movie)
When I taught in California, there would be this big moving-van type truck that would arrive in the parking lot once a year with a mobile aquarium in it. The kids would be shuffled through and allowed about five minutes each to “touch and feel” the ocean animals.
First grade visited the tide pools last week to finish up their seashore unit. The kids at HOPAC don’t know how good they got it, with their own non-mobile aquarium five minutes away from their school, and they got a good two hours to “touch and feel” the real thing.
The octopus provided the most entertainment of the morning, when it proceeded to spray black ink all over the screeching children standing over it.
Mikayla, Nurdin, and their jellyfish friend.
Sometimes I laugh when people think our kids are deprived, growing up way over here in Africa.
Not just because of that great guy right there, but because of the over 200 people who have committed to read the New Testament this school year.
