Sunday, January 25, 2009

"La vie is belle"

There is a french phrase we hear a lot "La vie est belle" and I am pretty sure you do not have to be a french linguist to catch the drift, and I am happy to say we are reminded a lot that life is beautiful. We see a lot of pretty snow. We are encouraged by other missionaries here struggling through the issues we are. We are proud of our children and watch them progress as well. But the biggest of all is we are happy that God is not a man that He should lie or the son of a man that He should repent. Has he said and will not do, or as he spoke and will H e not make it good? We are happy to put our trust in Him

In that though we do have doubts and fears. We are not sure we are going to learn the language well enough in the time we have, we fear that our kids will have trouble with our adjustments and our uncertainties, we fear that we will let "people down", we fear that we are not really good enough to do this, we fear we will not have the financial support we need and we constantly are asking God for more faith.

As we are doing this there was a confluence of Bible passages that came to my mind. One was Luke 17:25 where Jesus responds to the disciples request for more faith by describing a good servant, another was a friend who shared about Jesus' first miracle with wine and the servant's role in that, and finally today there was a sermon on Jesus' healing the centurion' servant (that last one was in french and my comprehension was spotty at best but I still made some apps when I read it in English today). All of these passages involve or speak on faith and it all ties in to the servants role. In the Luke passage I think Jesus is trying to get the disciples to understand that faith is not having a magic lamp, but doing what you know to do by having a clear vision of your responsibility, in the John passage I see the servants through obedience getting to be right there on the spot with the miracle, and in the centurions servant we again see where an understanding of authority and servant hood increases the level of faith.

I guess I am trying to get my mind around how keeping a willing servants heart and doing what God has set us to do will increase our faith. Though, at the end of most days Anna and I can truly say "la vie est belle".

IN the next couple of weeks I will be posting some picts and posts on the theme "a day in the life of......" on each of our children so you can see our daily routine etc.

Some more matters of prayer
Pray for Ian in particular he continues to strggle more than our others with French.
Pray for Anna and I this week. It would be an encourgement to both of us to see a breakthrough in french
We do thank God that He has called us and wants to use us.
We also are thankful that we've stayed safe and warm so far this winter.

Stephen

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am glad you posted again. It is good to hear your view point of how things are going and to be able to read it in English! I have been to one of the ladies' Bible studies through our church several times over the last two months. They are finishing up Isaiah, and I am sort of lost, as they have done a very in-depth study. But there are many treasures I can glean. One is that God helps the weak and that the weak are most aware of their (our) need for Him. This is tremendously encouraging, and though I've "known" it for a long time, it gives me new perspective of how much God has done/is doing as well as reason for rejoicing in our trials.