Fighting the good fight

Greetings from a very hot Tanzania Africa. I so much more enjoy the 85-degree weather than the freezing cold we get in Michigan.
I have been very busy this past week tying up many loose ends. One of the things I needed to take care of was our rent payment. Every year we pay our rent 1 year in advance in the month of January. This year our landlord wanted to raise our rent $200 more per month making it $700 per month! I was really upset. Many of you know that I have been trying very hard to raise additional support. This year while home on furlough we had 3 new churches take us on for support and 1 church drop our support. I thought it was hard but acceptable to take three steps forward and one step backwards until the increase in rent made it three steps backward. I was very frustrated to say the least. I began to pray about this situation. I complained to the Lord that this country is going to kill my spirit and my ability to accomplish anything for God. It seems like they are constantly beating me down. Some thoughts came to mind while praying. 1st, the more battles I fight, statistically, the more battles I will loose. I mean, you can’t win them all, right? Then I thought: if the Lord really wants us to have this particular house (there is a shortage of good houses in our city at the moment) then it doesn’t matter how much the rent is, just pay it. So, I had peace about paying as much as $100 more in rent or moving out if it was going to cost more than that. I met with the landlord 2 days ago and to my surprise, the rent did not increase! Of course we will have to negotiate the amount for next year’s rent later this year. Praise the Lord!

One other item that needed my attention this trip was the oversight of the church plant in Kingereka. I arrived at our church for the Thursday afternoon prayer meeting. When I left we didn’t have a Thursday afternoon prayer meeting. Well, we use to but then we discovered that the market day was on Thursday so we moved it to Tuesday but there was a different village that had their market day on Tuesday so we moved it to Wednesday and then no one came. Ha! Needless to say I was really surprised that the people started their own prayer meeting and that when I arrived there was at least 50% of our Sunday crowd in attendance. We had a good time of prayer and a Bible challenge by one of the men in the church.

When Greg and I left for furlough, we left 3 men “in charge” of the services. Greg wrote enough sermon outlines to last until the end of January and left them with these 3 men. The plan was for them to rotate the preaching responsibility. The end of January has come and gone and while these 3 guys are capable men they are not preachers yet nor quite ready to write their own sermons. I have written more sermons and have made arrangements for people to preach the extra 4 months my family will be gone. Pray for the whole church. They are doing very well and seem to be genuinely growing in grace and truth.