Yesterday Owen woke up from his nap early and fell back asleep in my arms. As I was sitting there, soaking up the time just to be able to hold him, I looked around our house, and it hit me suddenly, we really are here! We are in Togo. In many ways, we got here and “hit the ground, running” unpacking and setting up our house and it was nice to sit and just rest in being here in Togo. This is what we have been working towards for a long time now. I thought back to one of...
As we have come into the New Year, we have been doing a lot of reflection. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how they were going to choose a word for the new year and as I thought through, I thought, I guess the all-encompassing word that I keep coming back to is “Intentional.” Our first Sunday back in the States, in our Sunday school class, we talked about fellowship and what that means and one of the words used to take about it was “intentional.” As I thought about it more, I thought so much about...
In preparing our hearts for Christmas, Beth has started going through a book, “Advent, the weary world rejoices.” The first chapter talks about the song “O Holy Night,” where the book gets the title from and talks about how the song was originally in another language but was translated into English in 1855. I didn’t realize that this song was originally written in French, and like most songs it was not translated exactly like the original French, but holds a lot of the same sentiment with the hope of waiting to be delivered and that Jesus came to earth...
We have devotions as a school on Monday and Thursday mornings (in French of course!). One of our professors gave a devotion at the beginning of the year that has stuck with me. She used a picture of a train and used the illustration of the different “cars” needed for the “train” of adapting to a new culture. First of all, we need to be willing to try and communicate “communiquer” (even when we mess words up and say things like “I am finished” which means basically that you are dead instead of “I have finished” or that your...
“Je ne suis plus esclave de la peur….” It’s interesting reflecting back on this past year. We’ve almost hit the one year mark from arriving in Albertville. This time last year we were finishing up packing and trying to say our goodbyes. That seems in many ways so long ago now. This has been a very challenging, draining and exhausting year. It’s been very easy to get discouraged and to allow fear to control us. I wrote in our first prayer here using this song. At that point, I understood the words to the chorus (probably after looking them...
