Heads above water, but always on tippy toes…

Selu, an old friend, and I sat down and talked recently at a community meeting. He is nearly blind, and yet is strong enough to get around pretty good. His son will be one of our first literacy students.

Let him who boasts, boast about this; that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth. (Jer. 9)

“I had a dream…

… is it true or is it just a dream? Are my ancestors trying to tell me something or am I just seeing things?”

For our Pal friends, this is a pretty standard morning thought. They have their own complex system of totems and symbology that can make the interpretation of a dream fairly hard to follow for us westerners.  Not only that, the boundary between dreamland and waking life is not all that clear at times.

For example, if, on the way to visit a sick relative, a Pal person thinks of a bat (or sees anything related to a bat), he might be inclined to believe that a certain clan within Pal had something to do with the illness of his relative. He would then make a formal accusation by secretly putting some leaves from that spot on the trail into the satchel of one of the ‘bat’ line. After that there would be much discussion which would probably end in the eating of some kind of meat (the formal way of saying – ‘We are all done arguing about this, we are friends now.’)

A double rainbow that we saw from our back porch last week.

Asking

So we are asking over and over, the how and why questions – trying to determine the underpinnings of their thought processes. Where did rainbows come from? What about the moon? Where did the first man come from? How did he come into existence? Why is man here?

Over and over, we are told ‘Our ancestors said______, but we really don’t know. Will you tell us?’

A village meeting about who will be in the first class at the Pal literacy school.

Pray!

Your time – May 28th – about 6 pm, please pray for Elizabeth as she has another language evaluation here in Pal. She has worked very hard and is doing great. Pray that she will remember all she knows.

Thanks so much for keeping us here and working away in Pal. We are so excited to see what the Lord will do in this next year here.

Nate for us 5