Happenings of a week in Sanary

This week has been a good transition time, with plenty of work but also time to rest. I've mostly been becoming acquainted with the various ongoing ICC projects and helping out with a lot of the tech and web stuff. My experience with blogger here is helping me manage the ICCM site, which is great. During some of the more technical side of my work, I found the attached chart and showed it to Dan and Nancy... :-) [click for larger view]

Wednesday evening included two unusual events--a thunderstorm (the first rain I've seen since arriving in the south of France, the first in France at all this summer except for a brief downpour in Anduze in early July) and a trip to Castorama with the Painters. Castorama, esentially a French Home Depot, isn't that unusual in and of itself, but this evening they happened to be serving champagne (in plastic cups) to shoppers at the store entrance! Apparently this was a special sale for frequent buyers, which the Painters have become after all the work that has gone into the office.

Today I was able to ride into Marseille with Dan for ICCM's weekly prayer breakfast. It was my second-ever time on a motorcyle, and my first time on the highway with one, so it was quite the adventure! The end of the ride turned a bit sour when I burned my ankle against the exhaust pipe, but now I'll be a lot more careful in the future... After the prayer breakfast I was able to connect with Jean-Raymond, the local pastor and host to ICCM, who shared more details about the opportunities to connect with the church and in the community. It looks like I will be helping a new Italian family that just arrived in Marseille, tutoring their daughter as she starts in the French school here. There is also an opportunity to volunteer at the Marhaban ("welcome" in Arabic) center, both for English classes and French classes, which I'm hoping to explore. I recognize the need to keep a balance amongst all these different activities, but am really excited about the chance to help out!

This weekend I will worship with Dan and Nancy in Sanary before heading back to Marseille in the evening for ICCM's book study on Tim Keller's The Reason for God. I brought a copy with me with the intention of reading it over the summer, but now I'm signed up to explain the first two chapters and will definitely have to read it! (An excellent way to get me past the three other books I am reading at the moment to focus on this one for a bit...)

Here are a few prayer requests for the rest of this week:

• --Healing for my burn, which the pharmacist tells me is second degree
• --Favor in dealing with my French bank account: I found out this week that my card chip somehow was de-magnitized, which means I need to send it in for another one, but this can't be done until I update my address to Marseille, which will have to wait until at least Tuesday
• --Wisdom in balancing all the different ministry opportunities available in order to be a wise steward of my time here
• --Praise God that my French cell phone arrived--that's one less administrative thing for me to worry about now. :)

Prayer Guide for the Muslim World

Every year YWAM publishes a 30-day prayer guide for the Muslim world to coincide with the month of Ramadan. You can download the whole guide or sign up to recieve daily email updates this month (August 22nd to September 20th) on their website at www.30-days.net or www.30jours.org for the French site.

Harvest Time

Before leaving Corsica this week, my family stayed overnight with cousins who live close to the airport since my mom and brother had a 6:30am flight the next morning. We were pretty sure our departure time would be before anyone else was up, but that was counting without the grape harvest. Both our cousin and her husband work in the vineyards around Bastia, and the harvest is just starting. As an administrator, my cousin could start work as early as 5:30, while her husband, who oversees the actual harvesting, had to get up at 1:30 to be at work by 3am.

Having never participated in a grape harvest before, I had only vague ideas of the work involved, and definitely no understanding of workdays starting at 3am. Reality check: a harvest is hard and involves long, tiring days. But there is fruit at the end of it! Even if that fruit has to be crushed and hidden in barrels for years before it is ready, the end is a plentiful harvest, if the workers are there to bring it in. Since my time in Marseille will include both administrative work and more "hands on" opportunities, I was glad to see how both are important in the grape harvest as well. Please pray that I will have the same determination and perseverance as these harvesters in my work this year, even in long and tiring days, being a faithful steward of the harvest in which I am called to labor.

Then [Jesus] said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." --Matthew 9:37-38

Summer Reading

I've used a lot of my down time in the past few weeks to catch up on reading that I hoped to do before my work starts in Marseille this fall.

The first book, John Piper's Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, is one I've had for a while but am finally starting to read. The first three chapters examine in turn the aspects of worship, prayer and suffering in missions. I was especially struck in the chapter on prayer by the way prayer truly points to God's sovereignty and glory in missions--we recognize that it is only by and through him that the work is accomplished. It also made me very thankful for the many people praying for this year of mission!


My second read (because I always end up reading multiple books at once) is Bernard Lewis's The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. A professor in college introduced me to Dr. Lewis's works on the Arab world, and I had the opportunity to read several of his other books for school. This particular work I found a yard sale right before leaving, so I was quite happy to complete my collection. It includes a lot of good backround material on the Middle East before the arrival of Islam or even Christianity, and then goes on to describe the years following Mohammed's life from a scholarly and fairly balanced perspective. I recommend this and any of Lewis's other works to those interested in the history and culture of the lesser-known parts of Arab history.