MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 01-23-2008

Greetings, friends! Things are going well here in Bowie, TX. It has finally gotten down to what a Northerner would consider to be cold, so we are shivering through the 20 degree temps nobly at the moment. The past few weeks, we've been busy with school, and with preparations for the commencement of a new year of meetings, which begins tonight with our meeting in Lakeland Street Baptist Church in Fort Worth, with Pastor Karl Ogdie. The free Sundays I've had the past few weeks gave me the opportunity to preach in Eastside Baptist on Pastor Jamie Reed's behalf a few times, while he is recovering from some voice problems he has had of late. Pray for his healing. The services went well, and it was a blessing.

We are doing well in our Language Learning class, which involves a lot of practical study in the process of how to learn a foreign language when there is no formal language school (most of the world's languages). It's pretty basic. You spend a lot of time with the people, and you get them to teach you the phrases "What is this?" or "How do you say…?", "Say it again, please.", "Did I say it correctly?" and "What does it mean in English?". You can then proceed to learn a multitude of object words for everything around you. You then work on Possessives (my mango, your banana, etc.), then simple phrases (I run, I stand, I sit, I sleep, I jump….), and then move on to fancier things like tenses, imperatives, interrogatives, and so on. Finally, you develop dialogues, where you get the language helper to teach you conversations that you might have in their culture, like what they say to each other when they meet, or leave, or when they buy things at the market, or talk about things of interest to them (planting crops, the weather, social issues). All along, you want to know how they would say it, or how would they do in particular situations. The whole point, of course, is not so much learning the language, but building relationships with the people, from which learning their language and culture is a natural outgrowth. We look forward to getting to Uganda and putting this extremely practical and effective process to work on the field, attempting to become a part of the African cultures to which we are called to minister, rather than being American outsiders making occasional forays into their world.

Pray for our meeting tonight with Pastor Ogdie. I will be preaching and presenting our ministry.

On Saturday, we'll be heading down to Fort Worth for the big annual Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo. All our little cowboys are looking forward to it, as are we. We'll be going with several members of Eastside Baptist, so it should be a fun day. I'll be taking lots of pictures, and posting them when I can, so stay tuned!