Greetings,



This week has been full of surprises and confusions, happy fun times and exhaustion. I've been running fast but now that it is getting warmer it is getting harder to be so busy, at least until my body adjusts to the heat.



One of the nice things is that we finally got the water pipes fixed and we are getting city water again! I don't know how long ago it was, maybe 2 weeks? Praise God with me for the ability to do laundry and properly water my plants.



Speaking with one of my students about the pattern of sacrifice in the Bible that leads up to Jesus Christ, he looked at me and said, "You make me believe in Jesus." Things really clicked with his mind and he fully understood his own sin. I used the example of a broken window where each crack is a sin and he compared his "window" as one that has been on a car in a serious crash where there was almost no space between the cracks. There is no way to make the window clear again, except by replacing it. That all said, he showed no interest in pursuing this further. He says he believes that Jesus is the only way, that through his sacrifice he can be saved. Pray that God would reveal to A-d what this really could mean in his life. Pray that he seeks God himself.



In the course of my travel plans I met the owner of a large business who graciously invited me and my friend Autumn to his office for tea. He then proceeded to get things worked out for me without charging me the fees that I should have had to pay even though I never was told about them. Anyway, the next day I went with one of my teammates and prayed for continued favor in the eyes of this man. God gave us the favor and costs were cut for some shipping that was going to be rather expensive. But this was not the surprise. The surprise was to find out that this Muslim man reads the Injil (New Testament) and has a group of Muslim friends that read and discuss it "all the time". He really likes Christians because he says they do not cheat and they do not lie. He actually offered an Arabic-English Injil to my teammate, Jeremiah, to help him learn Arabic. Things I never expected to hear in a Muslim country at all…



The other things that made up my week have been hiking through bat and gecko caves, teaching kids how to jump rope, cooking again for hoards of people (we'll be taking this coming Friday off), discussing "Till We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis, reading Romans and journaling, grading mounds of rough drafts for my 7th grade research papers, and re-applying myself to my Kurdish study.



Pray for my students—those that believe, think they believe, want to believe, refuse to believe…



Pray for me—strength, wisdom, the Holy Spirit to fill me, to know what I should prioritize, to learn Kurdish…



Pray for Sh.—my team teacher who seemed open and curious for a while, but has backed off spiritual discussions, pray that she would seek out answers and seek God



Thank you all so much!

Colleen

Greetings,



Is truth stranger than fiction? Sometimes I think it must be. Fiction is by nature something that came out of our own heads, but truth is God's. That must be how such fantastic things come into my life. I do things I would never have dreamt of doing. But it all plays a part in the promise of more than we could ask or imagine.


I saw a magic trick show on the roof of my teammates' houses put on by a Bangladeshi TV performer for a group of us westerners and eighty to a hundred Bangladeshi men. It had music and singing and a great performance of several simple tricks. For this even I also went to pick up ten watermelons. I finally was able to get them after they tried to explain more than once that they had no ten kilo watermelons. That is one of the problems with looking the foreigner. Even if you say it right in Kurdish, they think you are saying it wrong and try to come up with something more reasonable.


This magic and music presentation was an extension of the Friday night events that several ministries in the area are working on together. We serve Bangladeshi food to thirty-five men who are working in the city as street sweepers and garbage men. Then they watch the Jesus film in their own language. It is an amazing ministry and God is working among these men.


At the school, things are wrapping up for a couple of the classes. My seventh graders are being teenagers and several ended up in detention this week. That has mellowed the class somewhat, and we are making progress. One of them, N-w, is reading and journaling Romans for me. I hope it will grow his newly professed faith and that he will be able to grow and that his belief is sincere. Please pray that he would grow and learn to walk with God.


And for myself too, I ask you to pray that I would more closely walk with my Lord. There are manifold enough temptations to distract and to confuse and to weary a person. Pray that I would live on God's strength and that I would follow him in every little particular.


Many thanks and blessings to you all,

Colleen