Day 14

We awoke this morning after a much needed rest. Renee, Leo and I woke up at the guesthouse early and went to the dining area as workers came in for the day. They serve breakfast with each room, so we were the first to be served scrambled eggs, bread and pineapple. This along with a couple cups of coffee made for a great start to our day. The rooms were reasonably priced at $60/ room, except Leo and I, who shared a room, ours was $70. I forgot to take a picture, but our room had a loft with 2 twin mattresses on the floor of the loft. The stairs were a little shaky and wouldn’t pass code as they are narrow and the risers may not all match. The half wall railing in the loft was made from 2×2 size and was a little wobbly. I didn’t push on it to avoid the problem of explaining the broken wall. Overall, we all enjoyed the rooms. There was air conditioning that kept the temperature down to manageable. We also had a shower with hot water.

We sat and talked for awhile at breakfast and then Emmanuel & Wintee joined us and had their breakfast. After breakfast, Emmanuel had a young man wash the dust of the roads from the past few days off the car. Once this was done we packed up the car and headed back towards Monrovia. We had only one stop, in Kakata, where one of the ladies from the WOP chapter met us at a gas station to drop off some butter cookies, peanut cookies and banana muffins. I can say that all were good.

What did happen for me was that I received a message from Pastor Titus as the car was being washed. I didn’t check until we hit the road from Ganta. Once in the car, I noticed the message on my phone that said, ‘We need your text and title for your message tomorrow so that we place them in the bulletin’. I showed Leo and Renee the message and asked the question of them…’Did you hear Titus ask me to preach on Sunday?’ After they confirmed I did not miss this in the conversation, I chalked it up to ‘This too is Liberia’. I now had the ride to pick out a passage and a sermon title. I don’t mind. Pastor Mike reminds the Elders of the Christian maxim, ‘to be ready to preach, pray or die, within 5 minutes’. This gets lived out in Liberia often. I didn’t even mention anything of the surprise to Titus. I’m sure his assumption was matched by his assurance that he informed me. I’ll tease him after the service tomorrow. May God be glorified in my humble, rushed attempt to ‘preach, pray or die’.

On our ride home, after coming up with a passage, Job 42: 1-6 and a title, ‘God is God, We Are Not’, I sent the information to Titus and prayed over what God would lead me to say. Job’s confession tells us that he understood the sermon title in his life.

Leo and I enjoyed pointing out oddities along the road that we could catch pictures of. Leo got more than I did. I’ll share some of his and Renee’s pictures another time. I did get a couple, not so odd, but interesting to me.

I didn’t get many pictures as this was our return trip and we’d passed by this way before.

We arrived back at Emmanuel’s, greeted by so many as the long missing members of the family. It was good to get ‘home’. We had a good meal of cabbage type soup and chicken over rice. It was very good.

After the meal, I headed to my room to work on my sermon, Renee went to work on creating a rug with the homemade loom Leo built for her and Leo waited a bit for it to cool down so he could water the plants. After a few hours I felt I would be ready to ‘preach and pray’, but I’ll wait on the die thing till God arranges that for me.

We got back together on the porch for some supper and afterwards Leo headed to bed, Renee went to work on her loom and I went downstairs to visit people we hadn’t seen for a few days.

I did want to reach back into past pictures to share and add stories not related to today, but interesting nonetheless.

Tomorrow we head out for Titus’s church with Sunday School starting at 9:30. We are going to have Philip guide us there. It’s hard to tell how long it will take so I asked Philip his thoughts on when to leave. He first said, maybe 7:30, then 8:00 and finally no later than 8:30. I asked if we leave when we say, will the time estimate change? He says, ‘Oh, yea, we can leave at 9:00 AM’. I told him we will plan for 8:45. That gives us 15 minutes of Liberian time to float.

Good day for now…