Newsletter (August 29, 2013)

Dear all, We are attending the Annual Reformed Family Conference this week. The speakers are Dr Don Carson and Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile (from Cayman Islands). This is the first time Dr Carson will visit Zambia and we hope that it will not be the last. We are very thankful that we have opportunities to listen to such godly and good preachers preaching God’s words to us. This year more than 1600 people have registered to participate in the conference. We have visitors coming from Kenya, Namibia and South Africa and in the evening the church, which can seat close to a thousand people, is fully packed. We are very pleased to meet our pastor in Ndola and several Ndola church folks. We also meet different pastors from other Reformed Baptist churches, some of whom we have met in Ndola. We did not attend all the sessions, especially for Zara as she is not feeling too well with a cold and cough.

The coming and going of people seems to have eased off a bit in August, so we managed to have some breathing space, not having to deal so much with the short-termers. God’s timing is simply perfect as lots of enquiries start pouring in and so Zara could focus to learn how to deal with another aspect of her role. Our director returned on 13 August so Timothy is happy that he is no longer needed to be the acting director. It looks like we will be quite busy in September again. Please continue to pray for strength, patience and wisdom.

We visited an elephant orphanage on one Saturday and afterwards had a game drive in the lodge there not far away. We could observe the baby elephants from a platform high up and it was an amazing sight to see how they behave and eat and drink. This is a project run by a non-profit organisation and the elephants will be reintroduced to the wild after they are about eight years old.

We are settling very well in Lusaka Baptist Church and thanks for all your prayers. Timothy was preaching in the Chinese Fellowship last Sunday and we thanked God that the meeting went well. We had a potluck lunch afterwards and we managed to talk to several people. One of them seems to show some interest in the Bible, but he may have to leave Lusaka very soon to work in another part of the country.

Lusaka seems to be windier than Ndola, so we seldom walk to work because of the dust in the dirt road. It is getting warmer now, although it is still quite cool in the evening and early morning. We are hoping that we can start walking to the office when the season changes and the wind dies down. With Christian love.