Hello dear friends,
We’ve written a 3 page newsletter that we hope you have the time to read. We’ve been here in Maputo for 5 months now… can you believe it?
Anyway, we’ve attached it here and so we hope you can click on the link below and take the time to read our letter, see our pictures and hear our heart. We’re sorry it’s been so long since the last newsletter.
—Click here to download our newsletter.—
For those of you who may not have time to read our newsletter, pasted below is our journal entries from it.
From Layne’s Journal
Maybe it’s been the Lord. Maybe I’ve been too busy to think about it.
Maybe tumors weren’t scary, weren’t contagious… I don’t know, but suddenly it was there: Fear.
Fear planting images in my head of me with each skin disease I saw. Fear making me wonder if I caught that man’s Tuberculosis as I prayed with him. Fear to touch his deformed hand covered in warts. Fear.
But when a voice whispers, “I am thirsty,” how can I refuse to touch his face and pour water into his mouth? When the weak boy says, “I am hungry, but I don’t have the strength open my orange,” how can I not get close and help him eat? When the coughing man looks lonely through his one open eye as we visit all the patients around him, how can I pass his bed?
A mighty fortress is our God, a sacred refuge is Your Name. *
Visiting in Dermatology has yanked me out of my comfort zone, called me to a new dependence on the name of Lord. There is balance between wisdom and faith that I find myself in constant search of, even more so with Anaya coming to join our family, our ministry. I take refuge in our God, who has put us in this place, and who guides our every step.
*Christy Nockels song ‘A Mighty Fortress’ the Passion:Awakening album
From Jon’s Journal
I’m lying here in a quiet room, thinking my thoughts and praying my prayers. My beautiful wife sleeps beside me, my dog snores away on the floor. My daughter is growing silent and constant… her heartbeat as strong and insistent as the sun that is slowly making its way around the far side of this earthen orb.
What is this great barrier reef of emotion that pushes my groaning prayers forth in desperate cries to the Savior to save my daughter? Do all fathers tremble so at the thought of my sin passing to her?
What a beautiful and poetic tragedy it is that at once life seems so perfect and so terrifying.
Perfect in the love and smile that my wife gives me every day. Perfect in the knowledge that she will pass those to my daughter. Perfect in the baited-breath, pins-and-needles, hair-pulling, stomach-lurching, toes-tingling anticipation of seeing her fingers curl around mine.
Terrifying in my failings, my mistakes, my pride and my sin all coming down hardest on the two women I love more than life… my wife and my daughter. Terrifying in the unknowns that I face with the lives of my wife and daughter fated upon my decision and resting in the steadiness of my hands. Terrifying in knowing that I will stand before a righteous judge and account for how I lead these angel-women.
So my prayers flutter up to a compassionate ear. Mumbled thanks and pleas for help seem to fill most of them.
Missionary father indeed.
First to my Christ and to His glory all my efforts and might.
Then to my wife, my family, kept safe and secure through the night.
What’s left to the stranger, the orphan, the widow. To love but one is worth the fight.