Light of Togo

Well, yesterday was my final day of studying French at Laval University.  It feels very nice to be done, but I realize that there is a LOT that I still need to learn.  On Monday, I begin my theological course with Tiff’s tutor, which I’m very excited about.  I’ll be working most of today on my first French sermon which must be ready for the beginning of this course.  It’s amazing how slow the process is when doing this in a second language!  I’m looking forward to the day when French is nearly as familiar to me as English.

Tiffany, in the mean time, will be continuing her tutoring through the end of May, then we will both have three months to study on our own before the tutoring begins again in September.

We’re excited about seeing the light at the end of a long French tunnel, and we know that we’ll be finished before we can say “French toast,” so pray with us that God will guide us in learning all that is necessary before heading to Togo.

I’d like to ask for your prayer in the coming week.  I am going to have a very full week with six exams in four different classes.  On top of that, I’ll be preparing my first sermon in French which needs to be completed by the following Monday for the start of my theological course.  I’m definitely not trying to complain, but I’m simply asking you to pray for Tiffany, Joshua, and me in the next 10 days or so.  Thank you!

It’s hard to believe that we’ve already been here in Quebec for almost a year now!  In another week, I will be finished with my classes at the university and will not continue studying there because of the rise in tuition rates. What is really great though is that Tiffany’s tutor, Suzanne, is offering a French theological course starting the very next Monday, on the 28th.  This should be a great opportunity to learn many of the biblical, theological, and ministry related terminology in French.  It will last for five weeks and there will be two other missionaries taking the course with me.

I’m really excited about this, as we will be learning many vital communication skills like learning how to pray in French, how to deliver a message, how to share the gospel with some one, and many other things.  Please be praying for me during the month of May that I can learn as much as possible and retain it! That seems to be the hard part for me; I seem to catch on to things very quickly, but retaining the knowledge in long-term memory is sometimes a challenge.

I just wanted to share some thoughts with you from a passage that I was reading the other day in John. Chapter 3, verses 22-36. It’s John the Baptist’s response to those who were asking him about the attention that was being taken away from him because of Jesus and his ministry. John’s response is extremely revealing of the way he viewed himself in light of the savior. I hope that you’ll read the entire passage on your own, but I want to focus on verse 30, where John says of Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

That sounds simple enough, I guess, but it’s important that we ask what it really means. What does it mean to increase and decrease? Well, I’m sure that there’s a lot more than I’m going to write about here, but here’s a couple thoughts that come to my mind when I think about this.

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Sorry to those of you who tried to visit our site over the past couple of days.  I tried to make a change that required the site to be down temporarily, but it turned out not to work the way I expected and the site never came back up!  So, I undid the change and all is well again.  I hope this didn’t cause you any inconvenience.  I’ll make it up to you by buying you a coffee the next time you’re passing through Quebec!

Here’s a drawing that Joshua did a few weeks ago of our future house in Togo.  Well, at least how he envisions it to be!  I certainly hope that we have a little more protection from the rainy season than a hay roof!  Notice that he didn’t leave out any really important details like the slide and swing.

I recently called our veteran coworker, Randy Alderman, to discuss our coming to Togo in Jan/Feb of next year.  We had a really great talk and it made us all the more excited to finally get over there and be involved in the ministry.  One thing that he really stressed to me is the importance of proper planning for the things that we are going to need and use in Togo.  Without explaining all the details, it basically comes down to the fact that there are many things which are better to purchase in America and ship to Togo rather than getting them there for a much higher price and lower quality.  Because we have never had a house of our own and all of our current furniture/appliances are either borrowed or extremely used, it will be necessary to set up our house from scratch.  On top of this, there are many other expenses that are associated with moving 7,288 miles away and getting set up in a new country.  After getting off the phone with Randy I realized, “wow, this is going to be expensive!”

God has already taken care of every single need, financial or not, that we’ve had and we know that He is going to work as He wants in this situation too.  We have seen Him use churches and individuals to meet many needs before that were completely beyond our own capability.  What we ask of you is to pray for God’s provision, and ask Him if He might want you to be a part of it in the coming months.

If you’ve read our updates over the past several months, you probably already know that Quebec passed a new law that raises tuition rates…no, let me rephrase that…skyrockets tuition rates for non-Canadian students.  We were told that because we started school before this new law was passed that we would not be affected by it as long as we enrolled in a “certificate program.”  Since doing this we have completed the fall and winter sessions and I was looking forward to going back in the summer.  Just to be on the safe side, I emailed the program administrator to see if I would still be charged the normal rate during the summer.  To my (not-so)surprise, she said that the exemption from the new law is only during the regular school sessions.  This is about the 827th time that we have been told something different!

Well this might sound like bad news, and I suppose it could be, but over the past several weeks I had been having an overwhelming urge to study more on my own rather than in the classroom setting.  I have progressed through the university’s French program fairly quickly, and I really feel like because of this there are some grammatical areas that I either have not fully grasped or have missed altogether along the way; not because I didn’t learn it by the way, but because I have skipped some levels in the program.  Unfortunately, in a class of 20 people I can’t stop the teacher and ask him to cover something that I should have learned as a beginner.

So the plan now is to study with Tiffany’s tutor and individually until the end of June, which is when the tutor begins her summer break, then on my own for July and August, and then with the tutor again until we leave at the end of October.

We know that this is God’s clear direction in our lives at this point, and I am actually very excited about studying on my own once this semester ends on the 25th.  I guess that I’m having a relapse of my old “home-schooled syndrome!”  Just please pray for us that we will continue to make the progress necessary for us to communicate effectively in Togo.