Friday February 16th

Today, after getting up for 5:30 devotions again, this time speaking from my mother’s favorite Psalms 121, later on I visited all of the classes at the Randall Godfrey School. I greeted them all and Emmanuel even had us sing ‘I’ll Fly Away’ to some of the classes. Emmanuel, Titus and I visited all of the classes there.

Now I am sitting at a local high school, Unification Town High School, waiting for an inauguration of high school officers to begin. This is a big deal over here with well over 100 people attending. I am here because Pastor Moses from the orphanage is the invited guest speaker for the program. Of course a visitor like me sits at the front table because after all I am visiting the guest speaker. 😀

While here I met a young lady who reminds me of Jessica. Her name is Natalie and she is from New Orleans, LA. She is with the Peace Corp and she is a teacher at this school. This school is where Julie and Comfort from the orphanage attend high school. Natalie and I sat together at the front table. Natalie sat next to the principal of the school (makes sense as she at least teaches there)

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Right away I noticed the resemblance of personality to my daughter Jessica. In fact when I told her about Jessica’s latest adventure in teaching in Thailand she immediately was interested. Brandon and Jessica, if you read this you may hear from Natalie about wanting to teach in your school. She has another year after this school year in Liberia, but she is planning on looking into Thailand as her next place to teach. She now teaches math and science at Unification Town. You never can tell who you meet and where you meet them. I invited her to Redeemer Baptist Church on Sunday. She said she may come. I hope so.

The program was originally scheduled to start at 10 and run till noon. It finally got underway around 11:15 or so. Emmanuel, Pastor Moses and I left (from the front table) sometime around 12:45. The program didn’t show any signs of finishing. Natalie also slipped out to head to Ganta for a workshop after we left. Having us leave didn’t deter anyone. We went back to the orphanage, had lunch and waited till after 2:00 to go back and pick up some of the kids who were still there. Yep, after 2:00, there was still someone speaking. I’m grateful that we left earlier.

In the afternoon I rested some, read some and talked with some of the kids. Now we are driving in Yekepa and dropped off an ABC student at the college and we are going to pick up Julie who went back to the school for kickball with a visiting school. It just turned dark here. We will most likely go back, eat and visit until bedtime.

Tomorrow I will have my chance to visit with Pastor Moses. I look forward to seeing where his beliefs are, how he can help in the spiritual care of clinic patients and learning more about his life. He gave a great speech on leadership at the graduation. Even though it is a public high school God can be the focus of a speaker’s message.

On Sunday I’ve told you I will be speaking at Redeemer Baptist, but I don’t know if I’ve mentioned I will also be speaking at New Yekepa Baptist Church where Bobbi gave her testimony 2 years ago. She had an interpreter, Mother Betty, who translated her testimony to Gio (a tribal language). I believe I will also have an interpreter so I will need to work on a message (shorter) that I can share with them. What an opportunity to share the Gospel with other tribes and tongues. Pray that I have a message relevant to their culture but faithful to the Gospel.