November 8th

I had the chance to lead devotions again today. It was supposed to be Breann, but she graciously allowed me to take over. Which was fine. Today’s Scripture was Isaiah 20. That was interesting. Read it and you’ll see what I mean. At first I had a hard time figuring out what I should talk about. As we were worshiping (and I was reading over the passage) the thing that jumped out as me was Isaiah’s willingness to serve God and to do as He asked. So that is what I focused on. We have the chance here to work with people who are doing just that. God asks and they do. I did my best to encourage them in that. To encourage them to keep up the good work and to faithfully follow God’s will, even, as with Isaiah, it seems a wee bit strange. It was at least a good encouragement to me. Hopefully to the NF workers as well.

We again went shopping. Today we went to the new market. I needed to find some t-shirts due to smell mine acquired from doing “laundry”. We found one shop that had some, but they were fairly expensive. I need to go back and find some cheaper ones. Right now though I am down to four t-shirts that don’t smell nasty mildewy. This makes for an interesting cycle of wearing one, hanging it on the balcony, wearing another, doing the same, and switching from shirt to shirt, wearing the least sweaty one each day. With the heat (which isn’t all that bad) and the humidity, I sweat plenty during the day. Perhaps if I lost some weight…oh whatever. Anyhow, finding a place with cheap t-shirts I could buy would be nice. Perhaps in January our visitors will be able to bring me some necessary clothes. We will see. (Just a note: I washed out some of the clothes today - the 9th - that were a bit smelly and they seem to be better now. Perhaps I will have enough clothes afterall...)

The sad part about shopping today was that Saladin was not at work. Apparently he made the trek home to see his family. Hopefully he will be there the next time we visit the market. He seems to try to take us to the shopkeepers that will treat us most fairly, even giving us tips on decent prices, instead of leading us to shopkeepers that will attempt to hike the prices because we are white, hoping for a kick back from the storekeeper. We certainly missed Saladin. Please keep him in your prayers. We don’t know why he would have gone home but we hope that it was not due to anything bad happening with one of his family members. We hope it was just a routine visit, although that seems questionable due to his low salary and lack of funds. Pray that all is well.

One other noteworthy happening today was the time we spent in the office in the evening with the NF director, Sudipta and his wife. They were there working alone in the office and we sat down and chatted with them some. Up to this point, “chatting” with them has been fairly one-sided, with us doing most of the talking. This evening though, we really felt the director opening up to us. He shared about his family and the state that he is from. He showed us pictures on his computer of his family. It was great. We felt like a connection was started that could open into a positive relationship between us and them. That would be great because they are close to us in age. Praise the Lord for this time together with them. Please pray that more such opportunities would arise (we are thinking about inviting them to “our” flat for snacks or dinner one night next week) and that we would be able to develop stronger relationships, not only with this couple but with all of the NF workers and families.