Finnie, Dean and Paula - South Africa
Prayer Update May 2006
Dear friends
This month seems to have flown by since we arrived home from the leadership conference in Bloemfontein. We spent a very useful morning at Home Affairs in Paarl sorting out the paperwork to change Eli's name and applying for a temporary passport in the meantime as we are travelling back to the UK in June. This all seemed to go very smoothly. We are told that the new birth certificate will now take 3-4 months!! We will then apply for passports. In the meantime however, (nothing ever runs smoothly) we heard a news report on the TV on 19 April that no one travelling on a temporary passport to the UK will be allowed into the country without a visa!! To obtain the visa we have to send the passport to Pretoria and who knows how long this will take. We phoned the High Commission and they gave one set of advice but then advised us to phone DHL who gave another set. The long and short of it seems to be that we will be OK - the temp passport was issued before the cut off date and our tickets bought before the date, but no one is really laying their heads on the block and saying that we will be safe when we get to Heathrow. No one will put anything in writing. This is nerve wracking and particularly annoying as travelling with 2 youngsters will be stressful enough. Please do pray that there will be no problems allowing Eli into the country on 9 June.
We are experiencing some quite challenging situations in our work in CNP and we have found this month to be particularly stressful. Without wanting to go into too much detail, we would value your prayers for folk to deal with issues in their lives that go back a long way - many of these are issues of unforgiveness, jealousy and bitterness, all of which rear their ugly heads and are preventing us from forging ahead. We are trusting God for breakthrough, but it can be a lonely, uphill struggle and we are finding it hard not to get discouraged.
On the plus side, Dean has just experienced a wonderful week of church planting with New Frontiers in Lesotho. It was a hard time for Paula and the boys at home, but they all coped admirably - even Joel, who missed his dad like crazy.
Give thanks for the 400+ people who committed their lives to God, pray that they would be added to the church through discipleship. Give thanks too for the numerous healing which took place and pray that as people testify of God's faithfulness His name be glorified!
Give thanks too for God's travelling mercies as we had some difficult driving circumstances (12 hours in each direction) but we were safe.
We are about to enjoy 2 days and nights away without the children and we need this so badly. You will probably get this after we have been, but we would appreciate your prayers that we would stay refreshed and focussed on the task ahead.
For regular news and photos of our work please take a look at our Blogs: Adventures With God and Finnie's In Focus
Thanks so much for your partnership in the gospel.
With love
Paula, Dean, Joel and Eli
XXX
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