Finnie, Dean and Paula - South Africa
Prayer Update April 2006
Dear Friends
We apologise for being a little late with this month's contribution but we spent the first 4 days of the month at the annual Southern African New Frontiers Leaders conference in Bloemfontein. We went with some trepidation taking the whole family, but came away thoroughly in awe of our 2 fantastic boys who behaved, slept and ate like a dream despite so much change. The conference was fantastic for us all in many ways. Joel loved the special 3-5 year old programme which ran in parallel to the whole conference. He had such a lot of fun, made lots of friends and learnt loads about God - what more can we ask! Eli was perfect! We kept him in our usual routines and he easily fitted in with the crèche workers, and went to bed as usual at night. He just started to sleep through in the week prior to Bloem', so we were very relieved as we were all sharing one room at the conference! Dean and I were very blessed by the teaching. We learnt particularly about God's picture of a glorious and victorious church and church as a living and vibrant cross-cultural/race/age community - see Acts 2-11 and Zechariah 8!! Wow - this is what we long for in our situation and what we pray for all of you too. We also attended seminars on Marriage and Ministry which were outstanding and very helpful. As usual the times of praise and worship were also thrilling, particularly with people there from all over southern Africa. English was very much a second language as we enjoyed praising God in vast varieties of African languages - rarely standing still for long! It was particularly exciting for us to meet up again with many of our friends from Zimbabwe. Dean had not seen most of them since our deportation 3 years ago. It was wonderful to see our 2 'disciples' in particular. One now leads the Westgate church that we helped to plant and the other is the church administrator - God is so good! There is such a sense of hope and purpose in NFI as we learned of several new church plants and saw the fruit of recent plants as well as those that have been going for a number of years.
We have returned with renewed passion for God's church and enthusiasm for our particular ministry. However, we are not thoroughly refreshed as such occasions are now hard work, despite having such good children! We still long for a holiday. Dean and I have 2 days away at the beginning of May which we can hardly wait for, but we have only had 2 weeks' holiday in the 21 months that we have now been in South Africa and we are really feeling it. This is a real prayer need for us as we are also facing quite a gruelling 5 week Mission Education trip back to the UK in June/July. We are quite concerned about our energy levels and generally having the time to prepare for this.
Our big thrilling news is that Eli's adoption papers were officially stamped on 12 March - just over 3 months from even hearing about him!! He is now legally ours and we can hardly believe it. Dean and I spent Wednesday morning at Home Affairs filling in all the paperwork to legally change his names and to gain a new birth certificate. Once we have this he can apply for passports. In the meantime, we have applied for a temporary passport for the UK in June. Even our Social Worker can hardly believe how smoothly and quickly the whole process has gone, but we know that it is the result of your and our prayers - thank you and please keep praying. Eli is a real joy to us. He absolutely adores Joel and will belly laugh with him- particularly when he watches Joel in the bath! He is rolling over from his back to his tummy and doing roly poly's and continues to charm everyone he meets with his huge smile and warmth. Joel is loving being back at Play Group. He is very much the older boy now and seems to be a born leader which is quite amusing to observe. He had a great birthday party last month and since then really seems to have grown up some more. He is certainly very tall now.
We are feeling much more settled in our new house and are very much enjoying the space. We are also enjoying Chris Nissen, although we have had some difficult situations to deal with in recent weeks. We were thrilled that Dina was able to come to Bloem with us this year. She has come home on cloud nine and we are praying that she will now rub off on her friends and we will see some lasting changes in peoples' lives. The feeding programme is going well even though it is on such a small scale. The food is really blessing those who receive it. Dean's Bible study continues to grow both in numbers and in depth. He is now a bit worried about how it will continue when we are in England. As the winter quickly approaches we are gearing ourselves up for the troubles that automatically come with the cold weather. We do see a lot more illness and death and people really struggle to make ends meet as the seasonal work finishes. Please do pray that we can bring the love of God to people who are seemingly without hope.
Thank you so much for your prayers and support, we appreciate you.
With love
Paula, Dean, Joel and Eli
XXX
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