Celebration Week!

Greetings from Luanshya!

 

It has been a week of celebration around our house. On Monday we celebrated our 8th year of marriage. It was a national holiday in Zambia so there wasn't even a restaurant open for us to celebrate. Still, it has been a great eight years and we are looking forward to the next eighty.

Monday was also my 20th anniversary of first stepping foot on African soil. It has been a very eventful two decades. There have been wonderful victories and incredible challenges. Through the ups and downs of life in ministry since 1985, God has blessed and our team of faithful prayer and financial partners has stood with us at every turn. Thank you for being a part of our lives. Now...

Last Friday I travelled to Mkushi to collect Colin from school. His leg is healing nicely and academically he is doing very well. He finds English a challenge because, quite frankly, he doesn't like to write. He will have to get over this, of course, because university courses require that students are able to express themselves through the written word. He loves math and science but he has to be able to communicate mathematical and scientific formulae so that the novice is capable of understanding his theorems. Please pray for Colin as he spends the next four weeks in "mom and dad's special English course for the literary challenged".

The Source of Light Bible Correspondence School continued to grow during the month of July. Thirty-four new students were enrolled, 285 lessons were distributed, 229 lessons were corrected and 17 certificates of completion were awarded. We received some new curriculum to enlarge the children's section of the school. There was also a new series ordered for the adult curriculum entitled "Light From The Old Testament." The new courses have already been put into play.

On Sunday I was out in the rural village of Buntungwa. They have completed 2,700 bricks of the 4,000 needed for the construction of their new building. After completing the moulding of the bricks, they will build a kiln, load it with firewood and burn it (the firewood) for five days. The mud bricks will harden with the heat and these will become permanent. Four men in the church are doing the work and the ladies are taking turns providing meals for them five days a week. They have taken real ownership of this project and are excited about the fact that they are doing it all themselves. The oldest man on the construction team is brother Mwape who is a retired tailor from one of the clothing manufacturers in town that went out of business. Pressing bricks isn't anything like pressing suits-especially when you're nearly sixty years old. I had lunch in his home following the Sunday service. We talked about life in rural Zambia. It was a blessing to share some time with this dedicated servant of the Lord. Please continue praying for this church as they go forward in their building program.

Last week we mentioned the teacher's strike in our part of Zambia. The union told all the teachers to go back to work, this is the last week of school for this term so it didn't really do much good to have the teachers report for classes when many of the students had already decided that they weren't coming and had unofficially begun their holiday. Our hope and prayer is that teachers and the government will come to some agreement prior to the beginning of next term (first week of September) so the exam schedule will not be jeopardised. Please continue praying for this situation.

Finally, pray for the College and Career class. A man named Various (yes, that's his real name) came in today asking if he could bring several friends with him on Friday. Of course we encouraged him to do so. We look forward to several visitors this coming Friday.

We appreciate your prayers on our behalf.

In His Service,

Patrick & Sherry