Audio of William counting for you!

Your prayers and Our needs!!!

We have asked you to be praying over many things over the last 2 years. Some of those needs are on-going and some have been answered. We TRULY are grateful and thankful for your prayers, many days they are what kept us going. We have been truly blessed with friends and family that lift us up often. We also thank you for your e-mails, cards, letters and gifts over the years. These too are tangible reminders of your love and support and every time we see them or look at something you have sent, we feel the love and prayers that go with it.

Life overseas is filled with more than its share of needs for prayer; physical, emotional, mental and spiritual in nature. Then, when certain other issues get thrown into the mix, things can get real interesting rather quickly. So when you take a stressful thing and add the stress of potty training on top of spiritual issues on top of physical things, you have a BIG need of prayer.

Now we are quickly coming to a point where your prayers are STRONGLY needed. One of the more pressing needs concerns our future here in Senegal. There are some issues that have come up recently that may hinder our return to the field as quickly as we were hoping originally. This of course has caused a little concern for us as we have been trying to seek God’s guidance, and thought we had an answer. We are hoping to get a resolution, one way or another, within the next couple of weeks, but in the mean-time, we can use your prayers. Pray that either way that we will remain focused on the job at hand until the end of our time here in Dec/ Jan.

We also have a spiritual need as well. Rich has been feeling some spiritual attacks at night in the form of some disturbing dreams. When he wakes up from them he feels very unfocused for most of the rest of the day. Once, when he woke up, he heard William fuss and when he went to go check on him, fear tried to grip him and made it VERY difficult for him to catch his breath. William was just having some dreams, which helped clue him in even better to what was going on. Rich spent the next hour or so praying over the whole family.

These, along with other issues, can start to have an effect on our family. Pray that we will remain close and rely not only on your prayers, but that we will remain a team, clothed in our armor, and stand strong against the attacks of the evil one!

This is a collection of our time with our friends while we were in the States. Click on image for larger view.

 

Photo collage 1

A photo collage of our trip!!

 

Guest Blogger - Tyson

I spent the last week of October in Senegal. This was my second trip, my first was in March of ‘05. This trip only furthered my view of Senegal as a land of contrasts. March was hot like, Las Vegas hot and it was very dry. There was little vegetation and you could hardly see where the previous years crops had been harvested. October showed us the end of the rainy season and we experienced one of the last rain storms. This storm was more what I would envision a monsoon to be like. It was preceded by a lightening storm for more than a half an hour followed by a tremendous down pour that flooded the sand surfaces of the vacant lots and streets. All this rain transformed the Senegalese landscape from the city to the rural villages. Everything was green. Areas that we saw goats and sheep picking through garbage before, were overgrown with green vegetation. Farmland that appeared to be barren dry land previously was now full of millet stalks, watermelon plants and peanut plants. But for a person from the Pacific Northwest of the United States, this weather came at a price. A muggy, humid, hot and sweaty price! :) The temperature was the same as March but much more humid. I also discovered the importance of sunscreen for those not used to being so close to the equator. A beautiful drive in the back of a truck out to the villages turned into a great example of why I should always wear suntan lotion! My sunglasses turned my face into a pink and white raccoon pattern. I learned that the Wolof have a name for white people that loosely translates into red ears. (Honk-a-nob)

What have I taken away from my Senegalese experiences spiritually? It is often difficult to put into words because so much comes to mind, that I have a hard time getting it out. So I’ll leave that for part II of my Senegalese experience from October 2005. (Rich's note: Hopefully SOON!!)

Tyson P. DePoe