| Christmas 2002 Newsletter |
| Merry Christmas! We want to take this moment to wish you Peace and Joy During this Holy Season |
| This is Larry. I want to write about the mission trip we took in September that included a group from Janet�s home church plus six ABC students. Al-though we have made several of these trips, we have never seen the open-ness which the people of this village displayed. The lesson that was driven home to me was that we will never in my lifetime meets the needs of the people out in �the bush.� Over two hundred made professions of faith. About thirty were baptized. We had one case of twenty Bibles to give. We have the money to buy Bibles; the problem is finding Chichewa-language Bibles available for distribution. We went into a neighboring village on a Sunday afternoon and the mostly male crowd all made decisions for Christ and then implored us, �Come back! Show the Jesus Film here! Start a church here!� See what I mean? How can we begin to meet the need in the face of this kind of response? A week from this writing, ABC students are returning to the same area for follow-up. I now emphasize to the students here that the need is out there, in the villages of Malawi, not in the urban areas. A couple of weeks after that trip, I went into a village in another part of the country without Janet. While attempting to show the Jesus Film, the video projector just died on me. The same thing had happened earlier in the semester in another location. It�s not much fun being out on a Saturday night in a village when the movie equipment breaks down and the villagers don�t understand that the white guy in the village is a history teacher, not a tech-nician. It reminds me that we have unseen spiritual enemies, rather like a Frank Peretti novel, who don�t want us to get the Word of Life out. This Christmas season, please pray that the Holy Spirit will move the hearts of ABC students to commit to long-term, full-time ministry in the rural areas of Malawi. As the lecturer in Church History, I am aware that the original meaning of �pagan� meant a dweller in rural areas, because these areas lagged behind the cities in becoming Christianized. We see the same pattern in present-day Malawi. |
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| Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! |
| God truly gives us the desires of our hearts ~ even if we don�t know just what those desires are! Just two weeks ago, we would have never guessed what God had planned for this next step in our lives. In fact, my guess is that if we had known, we may have felt like Jonah and tried to run as fast and far as we could have away from His plan for us! Who could have possibly guessed that He was about to turn our world upside down? It all started with an e-mail from Perry Jansen, our doctor here at ABC (Click here to read journal - it will be worth it!). I have enclosed his e-mail if you would like to read it as well. After reading it, Larry and I wondered what we could do. Surely there was some small part we could play to help save the lives of these children? We went to the ABC Clinic to talk to him about the possibilities. He told us of a little three-month-old boy whose mother had just died two days ago. His father had died several months ago, before he was born. His mother had named him �Muzuzu� which means �troubles�. Now there was no one to love and care for him. Social Welfare as a temporary shelter had placed him with the Dimmocks but Nancy Dimmock was going out of the country for a week � could we care for him for that week? Bringing a baby into the mix of our lives had certainly not been part of our plans, but if it could make a difference in this little life, we were happy to be able to help out and (most importantly) we felt that this was God�s direction for us. We prayed that we would be open to God�s direction as to what part He would want us to play in the life of this little one. By the end of the week, we were hooked. He had charmed his way into our lives in a way that we can only be amazed about. Yes, we did provide him with loving care, but what he gave back to us was a multiplication of what we gave to him. He stretched us and bonded us to him in a way we would have never thought possible. Marrying late in life, Larry had not experienced any �baby� events � like feeding, diapering and burping, but he took to his new role like a duck to water and has turned out to be a wonderful, loving �daddy�. When the week was over, we shared with them how he had changed our lives, and that we wanted to offer him a permanent home. We were absolutely heartbroken when they came and took him away in order to comply with the Social Welfare regulations. We immediately began to work towards getting �our� baby back. We will call him Carey Atupele Brown, after William Carey, the �father of the modern missionary movement�. Atupele is Yao (he is from the Yao tribe) for �The Lord has given us�. I guess �Brown� is self-explanatory J. While I was visiting Nancy and Carey the next day, the lady from Social Welfare called. She had another baby for Nancy to keep, a one week old infant who had been abandoned by her mother at the hospital � could she take her? Nancy said she was too overwhelmed to take another baby, but if they would allow me to take �our� baby back home� then she would be able to do so. A quick arrangement was made, and baby Carey is back home with us. Praise God! Does God give us the desires of our hearts? He sure does ~ because it is He who puts them there! We would have never dreamed this for ourselves, but God knew this little boy needed a loving home and that we had a store of love to give. ***Please join us in prayer for little Carey ~ that he will not be affected by the AIDS virus. We will not have certainty of his status until he is 9 months old. ***Also keep us in prayer as we try to assemble all the things that a baby needs. This is not an easy task in Malawi. Even though they have lots of babies here; things that we, as Americans consider �essential� are not available. ***We have begun the arduous task of proceeding towards Carey�s adoption and would ask your prayers for God�s hand to guide us through each step of the process. |
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