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February 15, 2009

10 Blessings from the last 24 hours

Hi from Chris in southern Sudan. I'm finishing up a 1-week trip. Thought I'd share some blessings I've had in the last few days. Please pray for Bev as she takes care of the house, the boys, and does her medical coordinator ministry as well.

1. greeted a church in my broken Arabic
2. ate goat liver in the market
3. hung out with great Christian guys
4. prayed with survivors of a plane crash
5. talked to my wife by cell phone from the bush of Sudan
6. discussed the implications of God's grace with our team
7. cycled 2km to church
8. prayed with a family who had been put in jail
9. seen a Sudanese pastor blessed by a donated bicycle
10. discussed with a shepherd how long ago his goat had died

Prayer Requests:
1. safety on the charter flight tomorrow
2. getting back to Bev and the boys tomorrow
3. wisdom in use of my time
4. that God would give me insight into 1 Samuel
5. judgement about our north Sudan team

thank you friends,
Chris

Published at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2009

1000AD

I picked up "The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium" (Lacy & Danziger, Little, Brown, & Co, 1999) and was amazed to realize that this place of organized trade, agriculture, and learning is in many ways more systemetized than South Sudan in 2009!

Did you know that in 1000AD, the Anglo-Saxons minted their own silver coins in a distributed network? The coins expired after 3 years to prevent people from counterfeiting them.

It's amazingly similar because to find someone 60 years old is rare in Sudan and nearly impossible to find someone who has reached 70 years old.

It's truly sad to realize that South Sudan may be between 500 to 1000 years behind the rest of the developed world.

On the positive side, I've observed in Sudan that people really know each other the way people in small towns know each other. That's something in common with 9th century England where most people did not use surnames because they did not need them! They have know each other all their lives and rarely traveled more than 50km from home. Relationships must have been deep and abiding. People must have been connected to each other as they tried to survive, fend off disease and Viking raiders, and wring a living out of the land.

One of the interesting things about being a missionary is that God causes me to constantly compare and contrast the world around me with the calling He's given me: Sudan.

More musings later,
Chris

Published at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)