Still Here!

Wow, I was pretty shocked when I checked the blog and realized it had been a month since I wrote!! We have been plugging away here, finished Unit 4, and then after a week off we’re now in our second week of our last month of study. I was also sick for about 2 weeks in there - just finished the antibiotics this week.

This unit is very different from past units. We actually left the school we were studying at and hired a tutor. We were tested in our language ability and are right at or slightly above where we were expected to be. Now we’re focusing on learning how to pray and share Scriptural truths in the trade langauge. Seems a bit crazy to only spend one month on it, and if we’d have had the amount of time others in our org usually get to study, we’d get a lot more, but for our purposes, this is going to have to be enough.

Church and the Christian life here sure is different. It’s currently an area of culture shock for me and I’m struggling through trying to understand how the church functions and how Christians think and interact. I sure would appreciate prayer on this subject. I’m amazed and slightly appalled at how the culture seems to have more influence on the believers than Scripture. I’m feeling a bit like, “Who will be different, who will make a difference by taking a stand?” I’m the guest in this culture and don’t want to be condemning them at all but long so much for them to understand what Biblical living and what freedom is, what it looks like. And, too, I have only just begun interacting at this level and in this arena. I also struggle with the caste system here – there are 5 levels and to believers we’re somewhere closer to the top automatically just because we’re white and missionaries. They even have different ways of referring to themselves if they’re in the “upper levels”, namely, if a pastor or missionary is praying, they refer to themselves as “your humble servant”, but if a “regular” Christian is praying, they just say “I”. I have issues with the inequality of the people, though they don’t appear to think a thing of it – they all know who fits where and accept the inequality of it. They also appear to think that we as westerners, since we generally formulate our sentences with the subject as the focus rather than the object, that we’re “controlling”. I personally may “resemble that remark” but I know that’s not true across the board.

Anyway, thanks for praying for us as we finish up this last unit. Please pray that I would learn what I need to to be able to communicate with my brothers and sisters in my new church. We’ll be sending out a more specific update soon – check your inboxes for that soon!

Following are photos I took on a trip to a “sawah” – or the rice fields. The first one is of paddies at different stages from nursery to growing to "aborted harvest", due to the dam that drains the paddie not working in time, and the second is a man working his field with his cattle.