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07/06/2006: "Prayer Update from Sarah Casson"
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Hello from Arua again!
Life is Arua is very stimulating. I love my new house and garden. Now that the rains have come its full of all kinds of fruit and veg like water melons, lettuces, lemons and tomatoes and I love pottering around it in the evening when I get home from work.
Sometimes I feel a bit lonely here but that may be because it takes time to build deep relationships. Could you pray that I will find friends I can be honest with and connect with on a deep level? One thing I really want to praise God for is opportunities that are opening up for me to get more involved at the church I'm going to, St. Philip's. Last week I went to see one of the curates to ask how I could be more involved. He told me (without me telling him about my interests!) that there's a desperate need for discipleship and he'd like me to help with running a discipleship course, perhaps using some of the Roots material (a discipleship course I helped to develop at my home church last year).This is an exciting opportunity. The church is bursting at the seams but many people have little understanding of their faith, or about a relationship with God or about how to live their faith out. Please can you pray that God will bring along the right people to join the course, and other leaders too? We'll also need lots of wisdom and awareness of local culture and the issues people struggle with so that we can make the course can be genuinely relevant for them. Pray too that God will protect this initiative from spiritual attacks and that the different leaders will co-operate well together.
Please pray for peace and the proper functioning of democratic processes in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the run up to presidential elections to be held on July 30th. These will be the first democratic elections for 45 years. Pray that the peace-keeping operation in the east of the country will be effective in rooting out the militias that still terrorise the local population.
Pray for the Mangbetu translation team, with whom I am working to check Genesis translation drafts. Sadly the new translator recently left the project, leaving just one translator, Nicolas, to work alone. It is uncertain whether he will be able to carry the translation load on his own, and continue to participate fully in the Genesis workshop series. Pray for encouragement for him, and for protection, spiritual and physical, for the whole Mangbetu project. Pray that God's will will be done in this situation.
I have just taken on the task of checking Genesis drafts for a second language, Omiti. This is because my colleague, Dave Bradley, who has been doing checking work with the Omiti team until now, has recently taken over the responsibility of managing ECG's language programmes department (basically overseeing all the different language projects ECG is involved with). Pray that I will establish a good working relationship with the Omiti team and that the checking that I do will be useful for them.
Thanks for praying. I hope you're all doing well. Please keep me up to date with what you would like me to pray about and all the everyday stuff that's going on in England that helps me to feel a bit more in touch with life at home.
With love
Sarah
