I apologize for the gap between the last email and this one, but we have been busy here - as all of you have been there, I’m sure. I actually thought most of you would have been too busy with your own families to have noticed my email pause. But, in case you DID notice, I shall supply another excuse. We have been experiencing a high degree of unreliability in our email systems. I’m not sure, but I think that the number of routers and such, combined with long lines and many interfaces between different service providers, sometimes introduces some ‘junk’ between here and there that simply causes malfunctions. For instance, the latest browser - the one specifically recommended for use with Yahoo! mail - will not work with Yahoo! mail. An older one would, untill recently when it decided to get twitchy as well. It was fine with other web sites, just not my mail site. Argh! Then, a few days ago, the old one started working again - sort of. I tried to send attachments to St. Luke for the printing of the brochures for our seminar on the ‘Spiritual Bride’ (more on that later), but it wouldn’t do that. I finally put the files on a CD and went to a computer store run by very friendly people and had them email it for me. When we get back from America I intend to spend some time trying to get something set up that actually works and lets us do our work. I know all this sounds very primitive for those of you happily cruising down America’s information superhighway, but sometimes Africa just insists on being Africa.
Louise and I will arrive in Kansas City on the 19th, i.e., less than two weeks from now. Then, two weeks from today (the 21st), we will give a half day seminar called ‘Introduction to the Spiritual Bride’ at St. Luke Church. I will give an introduction to the Introduction from 9-10, than Louise will teach on the ‘Twelve Steps of the Bride’ from 10:30-12. She has been teaching about that in various places around South Africa for some time, and the message is quite powerful. When she began making these presentations she drew the needed pictures each time, but recently I made her a nice PowerPoint presentation - in Afrikaans. We will make an English version of it in the near future, though. My personal experience is that the conceptual framework of the ‘Spiritual Bride’ has brought an entirely new and greater level of clarity in understanding the meaning of the Scriptures.
Louise was also well underway in writing a booklet to go with the seminar, but unfortunately that document had not been backed-up before her computer was stolen. We had ‘plans’ to get the booklet done before we came, but we are discovering that, if we are going to do serious writing, we have to build a strong wall around our schedules. LOTS of people have LOTS of ideas about things we need to do, more or less all the time. These are not bad people and their ideas are not bad, either, but there are just too many of them. For example, we just returned for two days in Johannesburg. Now you must understand, Pretoria is indeed a ‘big city’ and the administrative capital of South Africa, but it still cannot compare with Johannesburg in terms of resembling a ‘real’, Western-style city. So every trip to Johannesburg becomes multi-purpose. But the main purpose of this one was to participate in, and for Louise to officiate, a send-off blessing for a girl going off to college. She is the youngest daughter of the pastor of the first congregation Louise ministered in, and Louise has been close to the entire family from then until now. In other words, Louise has been important in this girl’s life since Jana was 4 years old. How could we not go?
Another girl who has know Louise since birth is Lisa, seen in the attached photograph. The picture shows a gathering of our congregation at the home of one of the members named AnneMarie. Now, AnneMarie did a beautiful job with decorations, food and, well, everything. It was so good, in fact, that the power failure that occurred that night didn’t cause too much trouble. The food had cooled a bit by the time we ate, but it was still delicious. Anyway, AnneMarie also put lots of pretty things on the tables, and Lisa thought that the table had more than enough, whereas Louise’s hair did not have enough. So, she redistributed some things from the former to the latter. I thought it produced a rather nice effect, actually. It certainly made Lisa happy.
We finally heard from Pastor Lambert, the overseer of the black congregations we hope to work with this year, that the materials we developed have been translated into Tswana. We had a friend do some of that earlier, but we have learned that one must use a translator for whom the target language is their FIRST one. They are very sensitive to small (to us) errors, and the purpose is to remove language as a barrier as much as possible. Fortunately, Fred has some students in his home congregation that are very good in English and they have now done it right. We haven’t seen it yet, but when we get it we’ll have to redo the documents as a blend of our layout and graphics and the Tswana text. This could be somewhat challenging, layout-wise, since we won’t be able to read the text. We may have to finish it off in Ruighoek with the whole team gathered around the laptop so that the right words line up with the right graphics. We read lots of good promises for ‘those who overcome’ in chapters 2 and 3 of the book of Revelation, so we shall simply have to do that.
We are very excited that we are coming to America so soon. Louise is a bit concerned about the possibility of extreme cold weather, which is my fault. People here talk of it being ‘cold’ when it is still way above freezing. From time to time I have, in response, shared some personal experiences that were a little scary. For example, there was the time I hauled buckets of water out for the cows on a farm in Minnesota when the temperature, including the wind-chill factor, was -100F. I got a bit hypothermic, but nothing froze off. Please pray that the weather stays far, far away from THAT!
Love from Africa Lary and Louise
