One month?!

Yep, you read that right. One month. It’s been one month since I got here. That’s so mind blowing to me; some times that feels wrong because surely I’ve been here so much longer, and other times I can’t believe it’s only been one month. Ironically, today I got my official residence permit, which was comforting to have! Apparently, sometimes that takes a while for those things to go through, so I was quite happy to know that mine came through before the three month traveler's visa I got to enter the country ended. It was a somewhat strange feeling to look at it, good though!

I actually preached last week for the youth service and Sunday school. Now, I was a Sunday school teacher for four years, but I always had a curriculum, tons of neat things to go with it, etc. This time I just had a bible and my brain. I also was under the impression that I would just be giving the message to the older kids since most understand English quite well on their own (although we still did translate). Otherwise, I expected I would be with the other teacher for everything, and we would combine the kids. Nope. I was kind of just on my own all of a sudden. Thankfully, the oldest kids are 12-13, so they helped with everything. And now that I have this warning, next week should go a little smoother.

The message I think was ok. It's really hard to preach here! The closest thing I have done to preaching was to give oratories which weren't biblical. Now, I have to preach to people here, but I have no idea what the issues are here! Like, in America, I know what things people my age struggle with in their Christian walks. I know what kids are taught and what they are not taught, so I would know what would be review, new material, too much, too little, and so on. I'm really terrified that things I'm talking about which makes sense to me aren't even considerations here. I tried to stick to really basic things or things that I thought my small knowledge base of culture here could relate to. For the Sunday school kids I just talked about 1 Timothy 4:12 which is "don't let anyone look down on you because you are young but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity." Here, respect to elders is mandatory and unquestioned. To do otherwise results in corporal punishment, something I've just had to harden my heart about when I see. A kid here once asked me what to do if an older person (I think the example was parent because he was talking about the 10 commandments) asked you to do something you knew was wrong. I didn't talk about that situation specifically, but I did talk about how we aren't practicing being Christians right now. We are Christians right now, and we can set examples for even people older than us. No idea how it went over. Maybe it was just a seed to plant now anyway, and it has to grow.

For the youth service (youth here is defined as 12-30ish) I talked about how to put our plans with God's eternal plan. I talked a lot about how we need to have faith in God's plan and trust in him rather than making our own plans. I pointed out that that is incredibly scary, but even a scared faith is still faith. The verse I really tried to tie it to was Malachi 3:10: "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the Lord Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it." I think this is one of the coolest verses I've ever read, mostly because it's one of the two places in the bible we are actually called to test God. Of course, this test is different because we aren't saying something like "God, if you're there, throw down a dancing snake on fire so I can prove it to everyone else you're there." [In case you're all wondering, there is no dancing snake on fire in my room at the moment. Pretty sure God's still there though. =)] This test is a test of faith in God; if we give him our lives, he will give back so much more to us. No matter what, that's terrifying, but at least God's given us his assurance that he will care for us (Jeremiah 29:11). Again, I have no idea how much anyone else could relate to that, but I feel faith is so universal it could be understood.

The good news at school this week: I gots a classroom!

The other news at school this week: Exams! Which means my classroom was put to little use this week. Oh well.

Every month, the students take exams to gauge their progress and to prepare them along the way for the important exams, Class IV and Class VII. Class VII is the most important because those determine if students go to secondary school. Class IV exams must be passed in order to go onto Class V, so I guess students get passed without question or at least not many until Class IV and then after Class V. Class VII exams are done, but Class IV exams are happening in November, so they took a mock exam this week. The other classes were supposed to take their usual monthly exams while Class IV took the mock exam.

However, the monthly exams weren't ready. We didn't know that until we got to school, as did most teachers. Basically, there weren't many lessons planned, and the students were quite bored; Christine and I spent a lot of time entertaining them with the exception of Class IV since their exams were ready. Don't get me wrong, it was a lot of fun; sometimes, even the simplest thing can provide so much entertainment. I use a stopwatch when I read with them so I know how long I'm taking with each student; they had a blast with us timing them to see how fast they could run around the building. Exams did start on yesterday, but Class IV was done with their exams so we completely reversed the problem. At one point, I was in Class IV playing a game with them where they had two teams, one student went up to the chalkboard, I would call out a math problem, whoever got it right first got a point. Then today we have a holiday because it's a Muslim holiday. So we have a three day weekend, and tests will continue on next week. My very new, fragile schedule more or less flew out the window this week. We'll see what happens next week!

I've tried to reflect on my time here at this first major milestone, but I'm really not sure what to say. I'm here. I know that much. I've learned tons, grown a lot already, and done things that I never imagined doing usually with little warning and less than ideal circumstances. I still have no idea what's to come though, so in some ways I feel I'm no further than I was when I got here. I'm just leaning on God and trusting him with all I have. Honestly, I feel like the sermons I gave he had me do just so I could hear them. If that's so, then I think there's part I forgot to include. Basically, I gave these six months quite literally to God. I came knowing little about what I would be doing, only asking that I would have enough time to study so that I could earn my degree (which would hopefully be used for God in some way someday anyway). Otherwise, I said I'll do what needs to be done. Even if you say that, God doesn't give you the entire plan. It's still scary, it's still hard, but I do believe that God will give back to me so much blessing, that I won't know what to do with it. I pray he does the same for all of you. :)

God bless,

Kjirstin