Grandma #2

Day after day we're reminded that we serve a great God. He has a plan for us, and He doesn't have to share with us what's past that next step we're going to take. He does care about the decisions in our lives. We can try to say it doesn't really matter what we do since as long as we're doing "good" things we won't mess anything up, but the longer I'm here the less I believe that. I've seen God working through too many situations to believe that He just leaves some things up to chance or happenstance. We can try to forge ahead with our own plans for doing good, but we sell out the good for the best.

Since we have a guest this month, we really wanted to visit a village so that Tim could see what life is like there. The village that we visit every other Saturday to teach English and the Bible canceled on us for the month of December, and we honestly don't know if we'll get to go back there. So we moved to plan B which was taking a trip to Pawn's village to visit her parents, but by the time we got to plan B there were no more holidays or open Saturdays left. So we took the one day that Rusty was going to have off from teaching.

Then that brought us to the next problem. We had planned to take some Christmas presents to Pawn's village, but we didn't have anything yet. We were excited about this project since it's something Pawn said the kids really needed, and we don't do these kinds of projects really where we normally work. We were more or less doing this because of Pawn and our work relationship with her and helping her family. That's pretty much a normal thing for here. We were going to go to the market and get the underwear, socks, and things for the kids, but then we realized the kids would be in school when we did go. We thought about delivering the gifts to the school, but we were afraid we wouldn't have enough since we knew kids came from surrounding village to go to that school. So we set off for the mountains for a very short visit not knowing what God had in store. All we knew is that we had given our word that we were going to go, and that was enough to convince us it was God's will for us to go.

We were about ready to leave when Pawn said she was going to stop by and visit her grandmother before we left. She asked us to go as well so we walked over to her house. While we were there visiting, Rusty asked Pawn if her grandmother was a believer. That got Pawn to talking to her about the gospel. Her grandmother really evaded the question about three times before she finally said she had never asked for forgiveness of sins and asked Jesus to save her. When Pawn asked her if she would like to do that, she said yes and prayed right then and there.

 The trip ended on a really happy note and with a smile on Grandma's face. She really liked it when Rusty said that now we really are brothers and sisters.

 It seemed that everyone was taking advantage of the bright sunshine. Everyone had clothes drying.

 We also saw pumpkin seeds and tobacco out drying.

 We found out once we got there that a lot of the kids didn't go to school because their teacher wasn't there. They have about 60 kids from kindergarten through 6th grade. They have 1 teacher for every two grades.

This little guy was born September 1. I was asked to give him a nickname. He already had an uncle named Joshua so I settled on Paul. May he grow up to be a believer who is zealous for God!