Quite a bit has been happening....

In case the title didn't give it away, quite a bit has been happening round these parts since my last blog. For about the first four weeks i was here, i'm not gonna lie, things were downright frustrating. Classes would not work out with any of our students; none of them would commit. About a week ago, i was supposed to have my first student, and she called an hour before class to cancel. Such was life for a while. We were enjoying the d-ship group (which is still going amazing!) and our language classes and we really saw some cool things happening Spiritually, but we were really bored and really ready to get started. For a while we thought that we would just never end up teaching. After my student cancelled, i really think i lost all hope. All of a sudden, though, everything started changing! On Sunday we got set up to teach an English class once a week for several students at a time, as our one-on-one strategy had so tragically failed. Then last night we got a call saying that we had 2 students who wanted to start today - a mother and her teenage daughter. We had our first class today and it went so well! They are a very open, warm, and hospitable family who are very eager to learn English, and just as eager for us to learn their language! We will be privately tutoring them 3 times a week and will be teaching a public class once a week starting Monday. We have continually asked for these opportunities and they are finally here! Please continue to pray for us and for these wonderful opportunities that we have! We hope and have asked that through these opportunities we would really be able to reach out to some of these women, so continue to ask for that as well for us.

As i said earlier, this d-ship group is amazing! The way it has worked out shows how much God has orchestrated it! We have 5 girls, ages 11-15 coming; they are so excited and are learning so much! It brings me so much joy to see them learning and applying what they have learned in every day life! Our study is on the truth, and we are focusing specifically on filtering out the truth from the lies that our culture and media feeds us. Of course, the way we filter it is through knowing the Truth, and letting the truth set us free. We had our third study on Sunday and, as we studied the truth about ourselves, i was overjoyed to see how many examples they gave from the media about the lies that we hear about ourselves everyday. Through what we were studying, they were able to combat those lies with truth from the Word! We are also memorizing a verse a week from Psalm 19 over the course of this study, so that by the December, we will have the whole chapter memorized. We're working on verse 3 right now! Keep these girls in your prayers! There is such a lack of d-ship for youth here and the enemy would love to keep these girls in the dark! They are truly being counter cultural by choosing to know and memorize the Word and apply it daily.

Thanks so much for your thoughts, prayers, and encouraging texts, emails, facebook messages, etc. i am really loving my time over here and am feeling at home and full of joy and peace. Discouragement comes with the territory of being away from home and doing the work over here, but when i am discouraged, it is truly y'all's prayers that get me through! So, thank you so much and keep praying!