Light of Togo

You might have guessed it, we now have internet once again.  It’s been 4 months of “deconnectivity,” which honestly hasn’t been all that bad.  What has really bothered me, though, is knowing that our website has been inaccessible to many people do to some unknown problem, and I’ve been able to do nothing about it.  So, now that we have a consistent connection, I am trying to figure out this issue.  I have disabled all but the most essential plugins for our website, and I’d like to ask your help.  If you are one of the people who has had problems accessing the site, could you please go to the site and let me know what happens.  Before you do, you may want to check to make sure you have the most current version of your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) Meanwhile, I’ll be crossing my fingers and hoping that this works.

The fact that we now have internet also means that we’ll be posting to our blog more frequently once again.  We look forward to posting some pictures and other things to show you a little more of what life is like here and what we’re doing.

Click here to download a printable copy of this letter on our letterhead.

So much has happened since our last update that it’s difficult to know where to start.  Our container arrived in port on April 24, and we expected it to be out of the port and in our city of Kara within about a week.  There were some major complications, however, and the port authorities decided to open and search the whole container.  Because of the fact that they can assign any value to anything in the container, we were very fortunate to come away from it paying the reasonably low amount of tax that we did.  After two weeks, the container finally arrived at our house on May 9.  What an exciting day that was!  We have spent the past week trying to get everything unpacked and put in its place, but we’re finding that this is taking much more time than expected!

Our hope is to be completely settled into the house as quickly as possible so we can move on to focus on the more important things.  I’ll be picking back up with the institute course, and continuing to work with Pastor Nicodeme.  Also, as soon as I’m able to, I am going to begin studying the Kabiye language, which is the primary language of the people here.  This is all simply preparation towards the eventual goal of planting a church somewhere within the Kabiye people group.

I would like to share something personal with you that God taught us through this whole ordeal with our container.  I know that typical missionary letters aren’t supposed to be personal (tongue in cheek), but I want to take the opportunity to praise God for what He taught us.  First of all, imagine that you take every single thing you own and you put it in a container.  Then that container goes on a ship that might sink.  Then it arrives in a port and gets opened and searched by people who could easily take anything they want.  Then it gets loaded onto a truck and driven through a mountain range where there are numerous trucks just like it at the bottom of the mountains, but not on any road.  The worst part of it all is that you are completely unable to control any of it.  This might all seem very unspiritual, but that was the reality we were continually struck with, of loosing everything we possess.  There were two things that we realized in those moments: that the worst thing you can do to an American is to take away all his junk; and, that we were way too attached to our junk!  God truly brought us to the point of complete dependence on Him and trust in Him that even if we did loose everything, He is still in control and has a purpose to glorify Himself in every situation of our lives, whether good or bad.  We also learned a lesson of contentment, to be content in Jesus Christ alone in letting go of everything else.  So often we find our identity in what we have or what we do, but so rarely in who we are in Christ.  So, we praise God for teaching us these things and I hope it can be an encouragement to you as well.

Thank you to all who are praying for us during this time of adjustment.  We greatly appreciate it!

I know that it has been an incredibly long time since I have posted anything on our blog other than the monthly updates.  Yes, we are still alive, and I do plan on writing more often once we have an internet connection of our own.  For now, though, I want to tell about what’s going on with our container and to ask you to pray for the situation.

The container arrived in the port on April 24th, so we drove down six hours from Kara on the 28th, expecting to get the container out of port and up to Kara by around the first few days in May.  Well, we’re still in Lomé!  Without going into a bunch of unnecessary details, the basic problem is that something on the container’s paperwork doesn’t appear to look right to the port authorities.  So, they have decided to open the container and go through it.  They might get around to doing this on Monday or Tuesday, and the whole process could take several days.

There are several things to pray for in this situation:
Pray that nothing gets stolen while many of our things are laying on the ground outside of the container.
Pray that they will be content to only look through a part of the container instead of every single item in every single box, which literally could take a full week.
Pray that after looking through everything they will not assess an insanely high value to everything, which would then mean that we would be paying much higher taxes than necessary.

We are completely confident that all of this is just part of God’s plan, and that He has a very good reason for it all.  That doesn’t necessarily make it easy to go through it, but it does give us the assurance that God is seeking to do something through this that we either don’t understand or that we don’t yet know.  Thanks so much in advance for your prayers about this!