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