Playing in Traffic

The last time we were in Canada we had the opportunity to go to a church planting conference to learn more about the process. One of the pieces of wisdom that the seminar leader presented was, "inviting someone to help church plant is like inviting someone to play in traffic". The implication is that there are spiritual realities at work in our world. When someone attempts to do something for God the enemy isn't pleased and that person (and those closest to them) tend to come under attack. I guess this week I feel like I have spent a little too long "playing in traffic".

Dave has been preaching a series at church as a follow up to the church planting conference we had last month. Last week he spoke about the Person of Peace and used an audio version of the scriptures (as a model that there are ways to share the scriptures even if you are illiterate). He also provided some mp3s of scriptures in local languages to a guy in our church who has been the most active in this area. This week he is either preaching on spiritual warfare or prayer walking (I am not sure that it is set in stone yet or not and I may be surprised with what happens).

I guess I have been receiving some of the brunt of the spiritual warfare. I have been struggling physically with sleeplessness, headaches, and dizziness that the doctor is still trying to figure out. (You can pray that my test results would bring us closer to answers this week). On the technical front, it was almost comical the other day when I was trying to print out a test for someone to cover my class and I had four different major problems that went wrong, culminating in a test that was printed upside down and backwards! (Ok, I admit by then I laughed so hard the counter in the office was the only thing that was keeping me up, but I was also pretty dizzy...) What should have taken 10 minutes took over an hour with 4 other people helping me. During this time Dave was listening to the radio in our car, unfortunately he fell asleep waiting and drained the battery on the car so we needed a boost. I wish I could say that that was our only technical problem for the week and that there weren't other problems that we encountered but alas...

However of even greater concern then our woes is the Pastor that we are working with. His struggle this week has been with his business school and paperwork with the government regarding it. Please pray for him that the people responsible would change their minds about this and that he would be able to get all the paperwork that he needs in order to move ahead (his school is supposed to start classes next week!).