FREAK SNOWSTORM HITS RWANDA!!!!!!!!!

Just kidding but we found out how to take a picture from our computer and we’re jealous of the cooler weather in the US.

Right now I am sitting on the bed, watching Julianna cook our dinner. We have been craving some spaghetti so my amazing wife went to the market and got all the ingredients that would resemble spaghetti. She ended up getting enough vegetables for us to have at least 2 dinners for under dollar!! One of the best things about being in foreign countries is cheap fresh fruits and vegetables. And one of the things I love about Julianna is her ability to make an amazing meal out of anything. Even the Rwandan ramen noodles seem better when she cooks them. I am so thankful for such a gorgeous, brilliant, helpful, multi-faceted woman to love and to be loved by for the rest of my life.

I am not sure that anything monumental, or even really amazing has happened in the last week or so but you can judge for yourselves. I told this story to my dad and I think it was blog worthy so here it is verbatim, (thank you Lord for the copy & paste function) I have been slowly making a map of all the plumbing in this place and made a huge breakthrough in my discovery! I found that they have plumbing running to a 2500 liter tank that is ready to have some pipes ran to a nearby building so it could have pressurized water. Then, with a few water heaters, we could raise the price of the rooms! Unfortunately at almost the exact moment that I discovered the pipe I discovered that it was busted underground and pumping gallons of water into the earth. I shut it off and tried to disconnect it from the main line (I had dug all this up for the previous 2 hours) only to find that I had accidentally broken a pipe that ran to another building. So… in an attempt to fix that one I realized that I had broken the pipe to the other building as well. Turns out that I had single handedly destroyed the water supply to literally every room on the hotel property. At that point I think I was finally happy that I was the manager so that no one would make fun of me for it, I just acted like i knew what was going on all along. Long story short, 6 hours later with the help of Julianna holding the flash light and playing music from the Ipod for encouragement we got it all running well again with no leaks. Again, another instance where I am so thankful for my loving wife.

I have been asked to preach in church by several people every single week we have been here, each time I have declined, or refused, or ran away. Julianna has been pressing me to do it, so last week when the pastor asked me to preach the next week I agreed. So for the following week i studied, prayed, prepared, got anxious just about every night, prepared again, revised, studied more, and on and on. For the first time in my life I felt ready to speak when i needed to. This past Sunday, yesterday, I got up early, sat outside, drank coffee and prayed for a while. Then I woke Julianna up and we got ready and walked to church. Then, after we got to Church we experienced the epitome of irony, or the epitome of African culture (we will never be sure). We walked in and talked with our brothers and sisters there not sure of exactly what to do as the speaker instead of just a member of the congregation. Then some of the people just started singing acapella (which is how the church starts here) so we found seats. It was not long before we realized that there was someone else prepared to preach instead of me! He was at the front with notes in hand. The one week that I accept and agree to preach, they either forget or just didn’t understand in the first place. We had told some of our friends that I was preaching that day and as they realized the problem at hand, they (awkwardly) interrupted the service to sort the matter out. So, I was torn whether I should just tell them I would preach next week and give the floor to this other guy, or take advantage of the confidence I had, although by this time my confidence was being replaced by sheer embarrassment. I decided on the latter and figured if there culture had room for this sort of thing to be sorted out in church, then it would have room for me to take the other speaker’s time to preach. So we had our normal church service and at the time for the sermon Bernard, the arch deacon (equivalent to a head pastor that is head of several churches), introduced me. I spoke on Romans 5:1-5. Encouraging them as well as myself to come to grips with what it means for us to be justified and at peace with God, and not only that we are at peace with him, but that God is slowly restoring his glory in us that one day we will be glorified with Him! He is giving back the very thing that we scorned in the Garden of Eden! How gracious is a God that humbles himself to give us what we don’t deserve solely because of his love for us? The message went well actually and the response was great. I am happy that God would use me for his purposes as imperfect as I am.

On the subject of public speaking, I have realized that there is a difference between someone that is not good at public speaking, and someone that is not good at winging it when they could have prepared much more than they did. American university life makes it difficult to really dwell on a subject, think about it for a few days or a week and slowly pick apart what is important, draw conclusions, make applications, devise metaphors to help communicate the idea, etc. All through school, I thought that I was not a good teacher (although Julianna has been telling me otherwise for years), or that I do not have the ability to write papers or exegete deep spiritual passages. This advice is mainly for the CIU students who can relate. Now, as backwards as it seems, after graduating Bible college I actually have more time to spend studying the bible. I want you to know that it is so rewarding to study the Bible, use the tools that we learned over the course of the four or five years of undergrad to prepare a message that is honest before God and uses the Bible with integrity. So, I think what I mean to say is this: the classroom is somewhat of a microcosm of the real world. In the classroom you learn theories and knowledge and many practical things, but be sure to learn it well with hope that God will use those experiments, and combine them with the actual world that you are thrown into and produce wisdom in your heart.