Your Greatest Asset

I begin with a tangent: For those of you who tend to martyr-ize us for our moving to a third world country, please know that at least right now we are not totally isolated for some “luxury.” Evidence of this rests in the fact that last night we too wasted a good hour of life watching American Idol on the guest house manager’s TV (they inherited a satellite dish on which they get a bunch of Arabic stations with some American programming).

Now to the meat of this blog: WE ARE ALREADY GOING TO VISIT THE GMZ PEOPLE!!! Tomorrow morning, May 16, we board a bus to travel 9 hours west from the capital city (Addis Ababa) to a city called Injebara or Kosober. There we will meet up with one of our co-workers who is doing a supervision trip in the northern Gmz area. The purpose of this trip is to check up on the government sponsored schools that have been set up in this area (our organization is helping the government set up and maintain these schools since literacy and mother tongue education is very important to what we do). This trip gives us the unique opportunity to travel to many different Gmz villages, to scope out where we might want to locate for our work (if the Lord continues to open that door). It also allows us to meet the Gmz people very early in our time, accompanied by someone who knows the national language (Amharic) so as to introduce us and our intentions to live and work among the Gmz.

In our commissioning service in Jackson, MI, our pastor charged the congregation by saying “your greatest asset that you can give to support this couple is not your finances, but your prayers…for what could greater impact the outcome of the project than our ability to enter the throne room of God Most High and make a request on behalf of his servants?” With this in mind, we ask that you pray for us this next week (May 16-23). First pray that our meeting up with our co-worker is smooth...if his car breaks down or something, we may be alone in a strange city without the ability to communicate in Amharic (though we will have a cell phone with us). Second, please pray that the Lord’s fingerprints will be all over our first encounter with the Gmz people and that our presence would ignite passion within the Gmz church when they are told of our intentions for future work. For us, pray that God would continue to add to the confirmations that this is where HE wants us to invest HIS resources so that by HIS strength HE can give HIS people access to HIS word in order to build the Gmz church into better worshippers of HIM!