Happy Anniversary!

Well, life seems to have settled quite a bit since "Black Monday." Although the political situation does not seem to have improved . Last Saturday the Mayor held a rally in Tana that led to a march of tens of thousands of Malagasy supporters to the president's palace. When trying to break through the barracades they were met with military fire. 28 people died and over 200 were hospitalized. It sent the entire country into shock. Over the past week the ex-mayor has been using the incident to further his cause by blaming the president for the loss of lives. The UN has begun helping with peace talks between the two parties and while their is dialogue-it has not of yet been fruitful. Yesterday the Barbour family, in Tulear, spent the day listening to gunshots and grenades. Our town of Antsirabe has remained quiet for the last few weeks. Although there are no plans of evacuation at this point, we are preparing logistically for the worst case scenario. I am nervous, because we desperately don't want it to come down to that. Madagascar is finally becoming home and we are making progress in the language. My hope is that God would have plans for us to stay here and help the Malagasy focus on God through this difficult time.

Aside from the economic and political struggles we are experiencing we are daily blessed by the Lord. It is so exciting to be able to communicate with the people. Although we sound like two years olds we couldn't be more happy. My conversations with Tina, our nanny, seem to be getting more stimulating and our guard is enjoying his time with Grant. While a month ago all I could tell Tina about feeling Eli was, "Food he." I can now say,"Give him this food at 11:30." It's exciting when you say something and people don't give you a blank stare!

Today Grant and I shared our 6 year anniversary together! What a great day and what a great year we have had together!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hey Jude!!!

Image
We are excited to share that baby Jude has arrived! It was an unexpected and early arrival, but a welcome one nonetheless. His due date was November 28th, so we had about three more weeks to wait. So on Friday (Nov 9th), we drove up to Tampa for a baby appointment. The doctor checked me and said that there was no action going on...no signs of an early arrival. So we began the 2 hour drive back to Port Charlotte. About an hour from home those tricky braxton hicks contractions were getting pretty regular and by the time we had returned home they were coming less than 5 minutes a part! So we dropped off the kids with Grandma and headed back up to Tampa, praying that we wouldn't have to deliver a baby on the side of the road during the long drive back! Once we arrived at the hospital, it was confirmed that I was indeed in labor (2 1/2 weeks early). I was so blessed to have a special childhood friend be my labor and delivery nurse. Thank you Jen for making this experience so much mo...
Read more

Addition - Multiplication

Image
We currently have two groups of believers that have been meeting regularly (Kilimary and Besatra). They are at an exciting part of their journey to becoming a reproducible church. They are about to finish learning (studying and memorizing) the evangelism track of stories, and are ready to go out to nearby villages and share the stories! In the next month they will be starting a new set of discipleship stories focused on developing their understanding of themselves in context of the Church. Last week, Grant, Doug, and Nathan headed down south to hold another evangelism event in two villages we have been developing relationships for several years (Andremba and Tanantsoa). Both villages have shown great trust in Grant, and have expressed their readiness to hear about God. The guys spent the past week going through the evangelism story set (20 stories from creation to Christ) with both villages. Both villages gathered their people to hear the stories (about 40 in the small village of Tanan...
Read more