Confidence Boost

Many of the Pal children delight to see their own faces in the Camera’s LCD. Most rarely have a good reflective surface on which to see themselves.

Confidence – Knowing that you are doing it right. False Confidence  - Thinking that you know enough to know that what you are doing is right.

“I am great at math. Dad, what is 12 plus 12?”  - Elias age 7

“I am going to be teaching the whole village.”  - Kisam – one of our first Pal literacy students.

Things here in Pal are moving forward at an ever increasing pace. There is an amazing level of interest in the literacy school and the upcoming chronological teaching of the scriptures. We’ve seen some real growth in the Pal folks – in terms of literacy, the guys who are regularly helping with our school have doubled their reading speed in the last three months.

At the same time, there are a few who have not practiced significantly and yet expect that they should be included as authorities in the educational process. We have been working through how to carefully inform and correct these friends without shaming them in the eyes of the community.

It is a little like looking of old pictures of myself – the ones in which by my own insistence I am wearing my shorts on top of my sweatpants (‘cause its cool, mom). It’s also reminded me lately of my own tendency to false confidence (trusting in Nate’s muscles or smarts is pretty pitiful…). Would you pray for us that we would continually depend on God for His strength and plans? We’d appreciate it.

Elizabeth holds a sick baby. We’ve been really praying about what we can/should be doing to meet the Pal people’s health needs.

Relative magnitude

As a mathematician and a student of science, I’ve spent many happy hours contemplating relative magnitudes (I know, waaaay too geek.). For our Pal friends, the abstract, particularly in relation to cost, size, and distance, is very confusing and thus can lead to some interesting assumptions and statements.

One of the popular current myths is that we are planning on hiring a company from the USA to bring in heavy equipment and cut a logging type road through the mountains up to the Pal territory. Hoping to let them down easy, I began a conversation about costs/benefits for anyone who would do such a road. I explained to our friends that my best guess would be that any road – even one cut by a PNG company would be very expensive. How expensive? Well... according to my best estimates… oh never mind.

Our friends can, with a mere glance at a village pig assess its relative balance of fat to meat, tastiness, and general health. We talked about that for a while instead. It was fun.

Then it struck me – It is the same for them when it comes to God’s Word and the teaching – since they have no real basis on which to assess the value of what we are going to be teaching them, they are depending on how that value is reflected in our lives.  What a weight and a joy. Will you pray with us that we accurately reflect the value of Christ in our daily lives.

Thanks so much for standing with us.

Nate  for the Cs