Well once again I have gone almost a month without updating the blog. Much has been going on. The majority of the month of February Kim was in horrendous pain, back pain. A week ago Saturday I went to lunch at my professor's house - an Egyptian lunch - with the team of people going to Cairo with me. He asked about Kim and I told him his back was still hurting a lot and he mentioned that when he was living in Indonesia, when someone would get hurt playing soccer or something, they'd pull their shoes off and someone would work on the person's feet. Next thing you know they'd be up playing again. Well, Kim found a Reflexologist and went this last week. She worked on his left foot, and about a minute into working on his right foot his back released! He's been pain free ever since! Praise God! I went yesterday and didn't get the miraculous results that Kim did, but my hips have felt a lot better.
I had two papers to write this term and I finished the last one yesterday...big sigh of relief! Now I just need to work on the study guides, looking up terms and preparing for essay questions for finals this week.
I'm so amazed that Hebrew is the one class that I'm not really concerned about! I've really come to love the language, the richness of the words. That one word can have so many meanings...usually a very literal meaning and then a more abstract meaning, but you can see how they connect (usually). There's still a lot that's not quite solid with me, but it's exciting to be able to open the Hebrew Bible to a page and actually be able to pick out quite a few words!
We're church shopping again. Eastminster Pres. was just a little too over the edge for Kim and so we plan on starting the search again. We've missed about three weeks of church either because I was sick, Kim was in pain, or this morning I admit, we were just lazy. So we went online after doing our devotion together and first watched Dave Hawkins' service in Plainview from last week, and then Tom Hansen at First Pres. GJ last week. Both were excellent. I think we both needed a dose of home and familiarity.
I leave for Cairo, Egypt Friday afternoon! I'm feeling guilty for leaving Kim alone for two weeks - he's not one to reach out to others on his own... But my family, including Kim, encouraged me to do this, so I'm going. I decided not to do it for credit, so I can just relax and enjoy it without the pressure of added reading and writing a paper (let alone the expense of another class). I'm sure it will be awesome. We will be visiting churches large and small, ministries in Cairo, the library in Alexandria, and of course, the pyramids. Temperatures look to be in the high 80's - and that's really exciting too!
Egypt is 90% Muslim, 9.5% Coptic Christian, and .5% Protestant, so we will definitely be in the minority! We will be staying most of the time at the Evangelical Seminary there, and I'm looking forward to talking with students there and learning about what ministry is like when you're such a minority. I can't even imagine. Here's the website of the seminary if you want to check it out: http://www.etsc.org/index.htm
I have pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my scholarship won't be renewed for next year. I was thinking I needed to keep a "B" average, but it's 3.5 which means two A's and two B's each trimester. I don't think I can recover from my first term w/ two B's a C and one P (it was a pass/fail class). It's in God's hands. We're getting our taxes done right now so hopefully we'll still be poor enough to qualify for good federal financial aid as well as some need-based aid from the school that doesn't have such stringent requirements. Truthfully, since I've written off the scholarship I haven't been nearly as stressed out about school. So maybe it's one of those blessings in disguise!
Well, I'd better get to work on those study guides. Many thanks again for the prayers and encouragement that always seem to come at just the right time. And I also received almost $600 from friends to help with the expense of the Cairo mission trip. God DOES provide!
God's blessings to you, and may His word become richer and richer for you as it has for me!
~Sally
