Retreating and Advancing

Well, after two and a half weeks of daily visits to hospitals, I ended up at hospital myself last Sunday morning. Turned out I had tracheitis and bronchitis, and the doctor gave me antibiotics to take during my first ten days back in Spain. 

I flew back here on Monday and this week has been our LDC staff retreat - a time of "retreating" in order to be able to keep "advancing" effectively in what God is calling us to do in the area of leadership development within the mission. We were a group of around fifteen people this week - some who had just been working with a Leadership Development Course in South America, some who were preparing to work with the LDC in Asia next month, and some of us who will be working with the LDC in Europe this spring. The week was a time of praying for these different training courses around the world, as well as taking time to share from our own lives and pray for each other.

As I look ahead at 2009, much of my ministry focus for the next nine months will be on equipping and developing leaders for Christian ministry. On the one hand I will be helping to pioneer this first LDC in Alhaurín: a course that will be attended by 20 - 30 leaders from different parts of the world. And at other times of the year, I will be working with a special Child and Youth Ministry school (PCYM): a course that will train around 20 youth ministry leaders from different parts of Europe.

Now that I'm back in Alhaurín de la Torre, where I regularly walk past the tower that gives the town its name, I am reminded often of the scripture in Proverbs 18 verse 10: "The name of the Lord is a Strong Tower: the righteous run to it and are safe." My prayer for 2009 is that I will regularly "retreat" to the strong tower of God's presence, so that I can "advance" in knowing Him and making Him known to others this year.

New Year's News

Only a few hours now until we begin a new year. I wonder what 2009 holds for me and for you. Of course, none of us really knows what lies ahead in a new year, but I find so much security in the fact that God does know and that we can trust Him completely. This time last year, I had absolutely no idea where I would be living at the end of 2008. As the year ends, I'm living in a new home, in a new country, and learning a new language. This time last year, none of us would have predicted this so-called "credit crunch" and the closing down of High Street stores that had been household names in the UK for decades! We can't predict where 2009 will take us either... but we can choose to trust the God who holds past, present and future in His hands.

We've continued to spend most of the past week visiting my Dad in various hospitals, and we now know that New Year's Day will be spent in hospital too. In fact, medical staff told us yesterday that he will probably spend at least another four weeks in hospital, and possibly up to eight weeks. As I understand it, they want to keep him on intra-venous antibiotics long enough to make sure that no further infection springs up in the brain or the surrounding bone... and perhaps that means waiting until the scar has completely healed and closed up. He still has stitches at the moment. But we are thankful to the Lord for His faithfulness towards our family, and for the fact that my Dad is now once again making a good recovery from such major surgery.

As we enter a new year, I pray that you and your family will also experience the love, faithfulness, guidance and blessing of God in 2009.

The sea and the season...

Only twelve days now until Christmas. Next weekend I'll be flying back to Scotland, where I'll be spending Christmas and New Year with my family. (By the way, my Dad is continuing to make a wonderful recovery after his recent brain surgery.) I'll have been in Spain for almost three months: weeks of settling in, learning the language, making new friends, and getting involved in some local ministry.

We don't have a car yet, so we haven't ventured much further afield than Alhaurín de la Torre. This week, some friends from Torremolinos took pity on us when they heard that we had been living in the south of Spain for two and a half months and hadn't set eyes on the sea yet. So they came to fetch us in Alhaurín and drove us into Torremolinos for coffee. In summer time, Torremolinos is a busy resort, with sunbathers lying on the beach and swimming in the sea. This week the beach was deserted and all the little chiringuitos (beach-front coffee places) had already closed their doors for the winter season. So we caught just a fleeting glimpse of the sea, and ended up just drinking coffee together somewhere in the town. But it was nice to "get out" and spend some time with new friends.

Christmas lights are up in Alhaurín now - which makes the streets look very pretty, but it seems to be putting some strain on the electricity supply, and some people are having regular blackouts. Last night we had to hold part of our youth Bible study by candlelight. The teenagers didn't seem to mind; it all kind of added to the feeling of Christmas, as we discussed the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus.

Mysterious goings on...

For a number of weeks now, there have been some mysterious goings on in an unused church around the corner from our house. If I passed by at night time, I could sometimes see lights and hear muffled voices. Once or twice there was also a strange sound of sawing and hammering...

All was revealed this week when Alhaurin's famous nativity model was unveiled. Sue and I popped round to the little church this evening to see it, and it is very impressive: the entire church is filled with a large model showing things like the Bethlehem census, the birth of Jesus, the angels appearing to the shepherds, the visit of the wise men, the flight to Egypt, Jesus' childhood in Nazareth, etc.  Now we know what was being prepared in secret for so many weeks. Those who visit the model are invited to bring rice, oil or sugar, which will be given to bless refugees this Christmas.

Living the Longdrop Lifestyle

I don't know what it's like where you live, but for most of my life I have lived in places where you put all your rubbish in the bin (or in these days of recycling, it might be several bins) and, on a certain day of the week, you put those bins out in the street for the town council or municipality to come by and empty them. Here in the province of Málaga, it's a slightly different system: it's your own responsibility to separate your rubbish into glass, paper, containers and bio-degradable stuff (basura orgánica) and then you take it to the street corner, where a row of stainless steel bins awaits you. Except they're not really bins: when you open the lid and drop your rubbish inside, it actually falls far down into the bowels of the earth - rather like what my African friends would call a "longdrop" toilet. It's simply gone.... never to be seen again! (although one assumes that the town council has a way of getting rid of all those milk cartons and plastic bottles.)

The other day, as I dropped my basura orgánica into the depths of the pit, it made me think about a conversation that I'd been having with a lady that I met last week. This young woman had the feeling that there was too much rubbish in her past and she couldn't imagine that God could ever really forgive her for the way she had lived before she recently became a Christian. As we chatted, I read to her from Psalm 103, which says that God "rescues our life from the pit," and that, because His great love for us is as high as the heavens are above the earth, He removes our sins as far away from us as the east is from the west. A similar verse in Micah 7: 19 says that God forgives all our past sins and "hurls them into the depths of the sea."

As I watched my rubbish fall into the depths of the earth and disappear from sight, I thought that this is the way God wants us to live our lives: He wants us to be quick to recognise our faults and failings, so that He can forgive us and hurl those things far away from us. He doesn't leave them sitting around to remind us of wrong things we did in the past, but He puts them out of sight and out of His mind. By His grace, those who trust Him can live life without guilt or shame. When we walk by our Alhaurin "longdrops,"  my friend and I can remember and thank God for His compassion and forgiveness.

A token of her infection...?

A couple of weeks ago (see 29 October) I told you of my little medical adventure, when I was accidentally scratched while rescuing a cat. I'm pleased to report that the antibiotics got rid of the infection, and the swollen arm eventually returned to its normal size. An interesting sequel to the story, however, is that the cat in question (pictured here on the right hand side) has recently begun "visiting" me at my house - popping round for an hour or two, and then disappearing again. "Is this a token of affection and appreciation for the fact that I risked life and limb to undertake such a heroic rescue?" I ask myself.

Anyway, I nicknamed the cat Tamba, which is a name given in some African languages (such as in the Gio, Kissi and Kono tribes) to mean "second child." I called her by this name because she looks almost exactly like Tibo (pictured here on the left), my first little cat that I had to leave behind in Cape Town. In fact, they could be twins, so I had to laugh when a friend (a mother of twins) mentioned that TAMBA is actually the acronym for the twins and multiple births association!

Now that she has visited two or three times, my Spanish "Tamba" has even begun coming when I call her by name. It's been kind of fun to have this occasional "visitor" and I wonder how long the visiting will continue!

All kinds of good things...

My flat mate is on a trip at the moment, but this week all her stuff arrived in a removal van from England. Her bed, her couch ... and around a dozen boxes of household things were carried up the steps and into our house. It's been nice to have a toaster and a vacuum cleaner again!

This morning, I was reading through an old journal and I was struck to see the fulfilment of a promise that God had made to me in July of this year. At the time, I still didn't know where I would live when I moved to Spain, and I was struggling with the fact that I didn't have the financial support I needed to rent a flat from month to month or to buy the furniture and other things that I'd need to equip my new home. I was only too aware that everything I'd trusted the Lord for over the past decade - all the furniture and household appliances that He'd provided for me in South Africa - had been left behind when I moved back to Europe, and now I would need to "start from scratch" again.

That morning in July, I was reading in the Old Testament when God spoke to me from Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 11 - the part where the people are told that they would live in "houses filled with all kinds of good things that you did not provide." Another Bible translation says, "Your houses will be full of good things that you did not put in them." As I read this verse, I felt that God was giving it to me as a promise for my move to Spain and, after praying about it, I wrote the following sentence in my journal: "I have a sense that I won't need to come up with the money to completely furnish a new home, but that God will also have other ways of providing for its contents."

This morning, nearly four months later, I was amazed to see the way that this promise had been fulfilled. In the intervening months, I had found a friend to share with, we'd found a furnished house to rent, and now my friend's pots and pans, table and chairs, curtains and all kinds of other goodies had arrived from the UK. I looked around me, and realised that I was living in a house filled with things that I had not needed to provide for myself. Isn't God amazing?!

This month, my newest challenge is that I'm going to need to buy a car. Things are rather spread out here and, if you want to get from A to B, having a vehicle is a necessity, rather than a luxury. As I looked at various websites with second hand cars for sale in Andalucía, it wasn't particularly encouraging to read that Spain is one of the more expensive European countries when it comes to purchasing a vehicle. I saw that even a 10 year old car (the age of the "old Mazda" I left behind in Cape Town) would cost nearly double what I paid for that Mazda back in 1999!

At the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy (chapter 2 verse 7), Moses reminds the people that, "The Lord your God has watched over your journey thus far... and you have not lacked anything." Later, in Deut 29:5, it even says that the people's clothes and shoes never wore out, but served them well for many years! And I realised that this has also been so true in my own life: I've been a missionary for nearly three decades, and I haven't earned a salary during that time, yet God has been so faithful to provide everything that I've ever needed. In fact, down in South Africa, He actually provided two vehicles for me: good old Mazda (on the left in the above photo) which was the first vehicle I had ever owned in my lifetime... and also a Corsa bakkie (the little white van on the right in the photo) which we registered in Helen's name and used for all our outreach and ministry transport in disadvantaged townships.

And so my faith was boosted this morning as I looked at this house "full of things I didn't provide," and thought of those two vehicles that I left behind in Cape Town. What God has done in the past, He can do again in the future, so I'm just praying that I'll find the right vehicle here, and that I'll have the courage and faith to step out when the right time comes. Watch this space for further news of this "miracle in process" ... and thanks for your prayers!