This is from Emily H.  I thank the Lord for her willingness to go and serve our Lord in West Africa.

It’s weird to be back in America. Upon arriving in the US, I was literally speechless when the guy at McDonald’s asked, in English, “what can I get for you?” Walking into my room at home was strange, as well- I couldn’t remember what clothes I owned or what my bed felt like or where my wallet was or what my wallet even looked like. But, as I settle back into the American way of life, I am slowly coming to remember what life was like for me 9 weeks ago.

We attract all the village crazies- young & old

9 weeks ago, I did not know the names Ibu, Halima, Mariama, or Fadida. The word “Fofo” had no meaning to me, and I couldn’t speak a lick of Zarma. I knew what it was like to sweat, but I didn’t know what it was like to sweat. 9 weeks ago, I prayed for the Songhai, but I didn’t see the need for prayer as much as I do now.

A few weeks ago, I found myself holding a precious little girl named Zaaratu as all the other kids fought for crayons to color with. Zaaratu was a snuggler to the max, so I sat and rocked the cuddly girl as I sang “How He Loves.” Will the little girl ever understand that God is jealous for her and how truly great His affections are for her?

Henna! I get a lot of odd looks now in the US

We are merely the vessels for Christ’s work; the megaphone to carry Christ’s glory to all nations. Without a voice, the megaphone is useless; without Christ’s glory as our goal, our work is useless. Because of our work in the village, so many women heard the name of Jesus. Because we loved on kids, they know a bit more about Christ’s love. Because we were light in a dark place, the Light is beginning to conquer and overwhelm the darkness on the dirt roads of “B”. I was a warm body that God placed in a very hot place, and He did all the work through me. Although Zaaratu and I did not speak the same language, I can trust that God did something on her heart during our time there. I am overwhelmed with humility because of the ways He used me this summer!

Fadida- sweetest little girl

The journey is most certainly not over. God is not finished with “B” just yet. Continue to pray that the women we encountered will be convicted by the words we shared. Continue to pray that children will experience the love that only Christ can provide through His disciples. Continue to pray for understanding. Continue to pray that people will rise up to the call and will go to work with the Songhai. We are so thrilled to know that there will be a family living in “B” and that there will be several teams visiting the village in just a few months! God is not finished with His work. I am back in America, but God is still in “B”!

The below article comes from the Superior newsletter.  What a great testimony to Cool River Church and our Youth Mission Team.  Thank you Lord for allowing this teams to plant seeds for your Kingdom in a town that only has one church.

Appreciation of On-Going Volunteerism:

From R and N

Hi Living Hope family,

It’s been one year since we’ve started our journey in Asia!  We’ve had a full year of language learning and ministering to the people of our city.  We know that we have only been able to live and work in such a place because of God’s grace and your prayers!

Our main focus for the past year has been language learning.  It’s a very difficult language, but our ability to speak it has been progressing well.  We’ve been able to learn several ways to present the good news and how to disciple in the local language.  We’ve been blessed to be the part of seeing people come to believe in Christ and now have started starting discipling these people.  The Father really seems to be moving lately.  Hearts are becoming open more every day and in a city with less than 1% Christians the Gospel is being heard and accepted!

This kind of movement of the Spirit doesn’t come without spiritual warfare though.  Lately a lot of our national fellow believers have been met with more than usual amounts of opposition from authorities.  However, even in the face of this our national friends are not backing away from their sharing and seem to have an even stronger passion to meet this opposition with a stronger gospel witness that is even spreading to other cities outside of our own!

This summer we have had students from Living Hope come to help engage the university campus here.  They were able to build relationships with English-speaking students and share the gospel with them and they also saw students believe.  This has been phenomenal and very helpful as we don’t always have time to engage this campus yet as we are still in full time language learning.  However, there is still a lot more work to be done on the campus and in other parts of our city.

As we look forward to the next year, we are expecting for God to be at work.  Our focus in our city of 1.5 million is to reach new people with the good news, disciple, and start new house churches.  We believe for us that means starting in our neighborhood and with the people we see on a daily basis.  Pray for us as we continue to share with neighbors, shop keepers, and friends we make in our community.  Pray for those who have already chosen to believe that they would be obedient to Christ in sharing with others and building His church.

As we press on in the work, we want our Living Hope family to join in the work by praying for…

1) Continued boldness both from us and from local believers

2) That Father would continue to blind the eyes of those who seek to do harm or to oppose the movement of the Spirit that we are seeing lately.

3) That Father would continue to strengthen the relationships we already have and help us build new relationships with others.

4) That Father would bless our language efforts and give us endurance for long class days and that our words would be understood by the local people.

5) Pray for our marriage.  That we would be a good example and illustration of how Christ loves the Church and vice versa.

I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, Always in every prayer of mine for you all making request with joy, For your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now. 

                        Philippians 1:3-5

From Emily H.

We’re down to the final days! We’ve been here for long enough that I’ve come to think of West Africa almost as home- it isn’t all that odd to me anymore to see cows walking into the yard or Zarma chit-chat outside my window. I actually touched the walls of our mud-brick house the other day and told myself I might actually miss living in there. We’ve got one more week in the country, then it’s back across the ocean for these two girls! I’m sad, to say the least.

Hanging out with the “family” on a rainy and “cold” day

This past week has been so much fun and pretty eventful! Our friend BB was able to come out the village and stay for 2 nights with us in our humble abode of a mud house. It is interesting, to say the least, to live with a West African. She found our food choices (peanut butter crackers & granola bars) hilarious, so we lucked out and got a few African meals. Like I said, we loved having her around!

Not as easy as it looks

With BB by our side, we were able to share Christ’s story with a group of women and plenty of kids! There have been so many women who have been able to hear Truth, and we are thankful for that. We shared several Bible stories with the kids who routinely visit our compound, and they drank in every single word of every story! It was so amazing to watch their attentive faces as BB translated the stories to them. Please keep praying for our conversations in the last few days we have left in the village. We have 2 full days left, and we want to finish the race strong! Pray that we’ll continue to stay healthy (something that the Lord has been extremely gracious about) and that we will have enough energy to give all of ourselves to the women & children around us. Pray for the new missionary family, who just got to the country this week and will be moving to our village in just a few months. We can’t wait to hear how the Lord grows what we have planted by using this family!

Once again, thank you so much for praying for us throughout the summer. The Lord has heard every single prayer and has been answering them very specifically. We are so so thankful for it! Keep praying for the Songhai, even in these last few days of our service here in West Africa. God is good!

Be praying for a missionary couple we work with in East Asia. The wife went to a large city in Asia for a check up and the baby is having organ development complications. She was there by herself and the doctors want her to stay. They are trying to decide what they need to do since they will not have help with the kids if they pack up and go to be with her. She still has a couple months to go before delivery.

Pray for the couple to have wisdom in the decisions they make.  Pray for the doctors as they try to help this unborn child.  Pray for peace for the family in this situation and allow them to know that you are there helping.  Pray for physical development of this child.

Be praying for Pastor Jason today as preaches on understanding what it means to fear God and how that fear enables us to fear nothing else except God.   Pray the Lord will use Pastor Jason in a powerful way.

Also, be in prayer for the church’s Back Yard Bible Club Block Party tonight at 6pm around the connection center.

From Amber Shacklette, working with Sojourn Church in Fargo, ND.

It has really been amazing to see how much more open people are with me than last summer. I have really gotten to talk to the neighbors a lot about Christ and why I am here!!! I also seem to really been able to share why I am here with a couple of my co-workers! Leslee and I are also really helping John out with this new church plant that he is starting. We have begun to play a very active role in helping him with that! And, I absolutely love it! Sojourn fargo is going through some changes! They are in the process of moving to a new location. They also are baptizing two people in 2 weeks who have been going to Sojourn for a long time, but have never followed in believers baptism or as Abby put it the other day, they haven’t been baptized on this side of salvation.

From James Weakley serving with Campus Crusade for Christ

I think one of the coolest things about being here has been just the opportunity to share my faith with so many people. I’ve been blessed to share the Gospel with lots of students and have some really cool conversations. What has been amazing is that I’ve had tons of people who have told me, after I asked, that no one had ever explained Jesus Christ or Christianity like that to them before. all of them saying that they had Christian friends. I am so blessed to get to share the Gospel with someone for the first time and be involved in such a vital part of their spiritual journey!

We’ve also held weekly meetings and bible studys on the campus that were open for students.

The whole trip has been very encouraging to me. It has been very helpful in reminding me of the ways and opportunities I have to share my faith in my relationships on campus.

From the Acts 1:8 KBC collegiate team in Ecuador with our Daniel Wilhoyte

Have you ever wondered where you are going?  What the future holds?  What will you do when…(fill in the blank)…?  Or the different decisions you may have to make?  For the past week, I’ve really struggled with these kinds of questions.  My mind has been in the future, wondering what I will do when I get back home and go back to school.  What should I apply in my life that I’ve learned thus far on this trip with thirteen other college students?  And not only that, but how should I apply these lessons?  Thoughts and feelings have flown through my head so quickly I couldn’t even keep up with them.

It was only yesterday that I realized that I wasn’t focusing on the here and now.  I was so busy trying to figure out what God was wanting me to do in the future, that I was missing opportunities for the Lord to work in my life in the present.  I was reflecting so much that I wouldn’t spend time in God’s Word.  Also, my reflection time was just filling me with unneeded worries and anxieties.  When Jesus was preaching “The Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 6: 25-34 He tells us not to be worried about what we are going to wear or eat or about our life in the future.  Then in verses 32-34, Jesus says, “For after all these things the Gentiles seek.  For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.  But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.  Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things.  Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”  God wants to use me today, and I was preventing myself from being a willing vessel for the honor and glory of God.  I wasn’t focusing on the people around me or the open doors that God was placing in my path.

So with this in mind, I’ve been reminded that I need to be present in the present and not in the future.  The future is good.  Planning is good.  But thinking about “what ifs” when they haven’t happened or decisions that can’t be dealt with at the moment are not part of God’s plan.  That’s when I have to continue living day-by-day with faith and trusting in God’s promise that He has great plans to prosper me and not to harm me (Jeremiah 29:11).

From Alex Jane

As school has let out for the summer, our plans have changed a little bit. Instead of see the kids everyday at school and even after school we are having to go out and find them, which is somewhat of an adventure. This past Friday our team along with Mark went out and did “Street Work.” We walked around the streets of Calderwood searching for kids hanging about on the streets. While we were out searching, Marks family was back at his flat in prayer. There was so much comfort knowing that we were looking for kids to share the love of Jesus with that there was a family sitting at home praying over us and the “Street Work” operation. This is a rather new form of outreach for Mark, and Calderwood, but it is definitely something that they are passionate about and feeling a calling to pursue. So please be in prayer for the team as the continue to walk to streets looking and praying for any opportunity to share the love of Christ with those who don’t know him. Also be in prayer for their safety and that they would be bold and confident in the fact the God is in control.

We also got the opportunity this week to go and visit The Faith Mission in Edinburgh. The Faith Mission has many different centers all over Great Britain and Ireland. This mission is financed on the “faith principle” and has no guarantee from churches or other means. Its motto is, “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” Faith Mission is also a bible college that has equipping men and women in different areas of Christian ministries for over 110 years and have graduated students serving in places all over Britain and Ireland. Faith Mission also puts on four different conferences each year in different cities. It is for ages 14 and up. The day would begin in the morning with a scripture reading and then have different seminars throughout the day and end with a worship service at night. This was such a great opportunity for us to be rejuvenated and to be just filled with the Holy Spirit as we heard from some very passionate speakers. It was so refreshing after weeks of pouring out to kids of the community to just be fed in this way. During this weekend we got to set in with John as he taught lessons to a group of about 25-30 youth aged kids teaching the book of Hebrews. Just pray for this organization that they would continue to grow and that there financial needs would continue to be provided as they are educating people to spread the word of God throughout.

I am aware that this week the church family has been praying for this team and I am so thankful, because your prayers could not have came at a better time. There are battles that are being fought amongst us daily, and I have found the only way to win is to be disciplined in prayer and to lean on the truth of the word. It seems to me that the devil is well aware of what is going on here in Scotland and the harvest that is being planted and he is fearful. He knows that God is going to prevail and that His name is going to be glorified in the end and church the devil does not want us here doing the Lords work. So thank you for your prayers and be joyful in the fact that it is evident that we are here making a difference and being used as tools in Gods work. I also must say that you church have been on my heart this week as well. I have found that since I am over here I am beginning to view the cross in a very different light. I have grown up knowing that the when Jesus was crucified on the cross that it was my sins that were forgiven. However, not only was it my sins that were forgiven that day but it was also my sins that drove the nails into the hands of feet into my Savior. I think that we so often look the cross as a point of rescue, which it very much is, but the cross is also somewhat of a murder site as it was Christ who took the blame in our place.It was His blood that bought us and it was also His blood that bought the cross. Once we have made a commitment to follow Christ everyday of our life we have also joined a different church. The Church of Jesus Christ. As I am studying more and more of the cross I have also developed an even deeper feeling of mourning of those who have not experienced the rescue side of the cross. However, my heart is not only mourning for those here who do not know him, but for those sitting at home knowing who Christ is and do nothing about it. For those who sit in the pews of the church being perfectly comfortable in the life that they live, but the thing is dear friends we are not called to be comfortable because this is a foreign land that we live in. So my heart mourns also for those who sit and proclaim to know Christ and are doing nothing about it. Who choose to remain in the comfort of their own homes where nothing can touch them and their faith cannot be tested. Where is our sense of urgency brothers and sisters and our eagerness to return home. We are not a perfect people, which means that we do not make up a perfect church but the beauty is that in Christ alone we reach perfection. In Christ alone we make up a perfect church. So church as you continue your day please don’t forget that you have been placed here for a propose and when the day comes that you stand before our Lord, I pray that your life will not be considered a safe life, but a life in which you have taking risk and hung on by faith to our Savior who is in ultimate control. Don’t go on wasting your life. Please pray for those amongst you who do not know Christ because the fact of the matter is that there are plenty of people sitting beside you in church, school, and work that don’t know Him. Be on mission every day for Christ and pray to be made uncomfortable.