I had my front tooth knocked out back in '02, and no thanks to Alice, she took the only photo that exists of me without my tooth.
For this and many other "shocking" photos, feel free to visit my online photo album.
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Monday, September 13, 2004
"Weekend Update"
So, blogging has become slightly more difficult because of a combination of the fact that we had a really busy weekend and the internet connection here has been spotty (heh heh, yep, the tough life of a missionary… ;^)
We had an incredibly blessed weekend… it started off at Kayamandi where we were to host a forum on entrepreneurial for the high school students. We had originally expected about 50 to show up, but unfortunately, due to some sort of scheduling miscommunication, only about 7 showed up. So in order to not overwhelm the kids, only part of our group of 25 stayed there to work with the students. The rest of the group (myself included) ended up going on a prayer walk through Kayamandi instead.
Afterwards, we relaxed in Stellenbosch (a very nice university town just a couple of kilometers from Kayamandi – think “Downtown Palo Alto”), and in the evening we were treated to a dinner at Moyo, which was known as an African experience. It was a whole evening of eating African cuisine (which included more ostrich, as well as antelope) and watching African performances of singing and dancing. The evening was concluded with getting pretty much the entire missions team onto the dance floor and dancing… it was quite a site. =)
Sunday, a few of us headed down to Cape Point, which is the southernmost point of Africa. We climbed the point, and we ended up seeing a whole lot of different small animals, including a tortoise, a turtle, a few ostriches (yep – and we had just ate ostriches the night before), a small group of penguins, and a whole lotta baboons. Remind me to tell you the story of how scary those baboons can get… =)
In the evening, Peter (my client) invited us to visit his church where he leads worship. It’s a Baptist church… but I realized that “Baptist” means something very different outside the U.S. than it does in the U.S. – it’s definitely significantly more charismatic than you would think.
And today was the day that I was dreading the most ever since I started this whole Equip venture. It’s the day where we need to cover 3 Ps, which is basically 30% of everything that we do, all wrapped into one day. And honestly, with the Lord’s significant blessing, it went pretty much ok, even though I was really exhausted afterwards.
So now, with 8 of 10 Ps completed (the last two will be done on Wednesday), I’m realizing that God really has blessed this specific client/consultant match-up. And even though this hasn’t been a very “religiously emotional” missions trip, I do realize and see that God is starting to really work by helping me to see areas in my own life that I need to start drastically repurposing in order to more fully live out His will for me.
Tonight, Jeremy, Eric and I were hanging out in their room talking more about church, Christianity, and how it relates (or doesn’t relate) to our society today, and it really was helping me to formulate into words a lot of the things and struggles and issues that I’ve had in my own life over the past 5 or 6 years.
All in all, I’m not really sure where God is leading me with all this… but I do know, see and realize that there is a journey the God is beginning to take me through… that He really does have a will for me that’s beyond just being an IT consultant or working at Pixar for life. And even though it’s still a struggle for me to place the total faith that He demands of us in order to live in His fulfillment, I do want to begin walking (albeit cautiously) down that path, in order to grow my faith and trust in Him so that I can start living that life.
Like I said… a lot of this is very cognitive and not necessarily spiritually emotional or anything… and I’m not really sure if that’s a good thing or bad thing or what.
But please continue to pray for me, my team, and the clients. God’s really making strides here, and I believe that there’s still a whole lotta stuff He wants to do before we leave.
Praises: That God delivered us from the Day of 3Ps, without any serious injuries. =) And that I’m really starting to believe that God wants to grow me and show me His will for my life.
Requests: There’s a big difference between impact and sustainability. Pray that whatever God’s starting to do here will last, and that I can take tangible things with me back to the States that I can work on. To give you an imagery of this, I can see the various puzzle pieces, but I can’t seem to put it together, and I don’t know what the final image is supposed to look like.
Also, continue to pray that my client and I can continue to see God’s ultimate goal for his business, and that God will continue to intercede, even supernaturally.
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