Well, this was the final day of Genesis for the class. We finished at around 3:00 noticing that the last verses of the book were words of life in a world filled with sin and death. The curse may have come but God in His mercy provided a means of life. We then went to the book of Revelation and saw how the final chapter ends for us: Behold, I am coming soon. Just like for Joseph and the Israelites, God leaves us with words of hope.
I try to begin each day with a short meditation and this morning we looked at Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3. I mentioned that it will be a struggle in the Christian’s life to understand just how much God loves them – the height, depth and width. In Ephesians 1-2 we looked at how we are loved from eternity past and we are loved in Christ. I was so thankful to tell these men of God’s abundant love for them and how they must “struggle” to know of how great this love is and ever will be.
The Mongolians have had the New Testament from about 1993 and the Old Testament for only 3 years. 3 years! And the OT translation is very weak as they rushed through to translate it. So it was an amazing experience to be able to work through the first book of their OT with them this past week. It felt like there was so much more to teach as we did not even look at the life of Isaac or Jacob. But that is with most of life and ministry opportunities – the task is always bigger than our time or strength. So I am also thankful for a sovereign God who, like Ephesians 3 reminds us, loves the Mongolian church with an everlasting love.
We have two breaks during the day and I have taken to drink their “coffee”, a mixture of coffee, powdered milk and sugar poured into boiling water. Believe it or not it is called Mac Coffee. The drink of choice for lunch is a mixture of water, milk and salt and this I have not been able to get used to yet. The man sitting across from me at lunch poured a huge portion into his bowl and began to drink it like soup. Needless to say, I was duly impressed and now consider him my lunch hero for being able to handle that much WMS mixture at one time.
This afternoon after the test I went for a walk again and nearly got run over. Mongolian driving is absolutely bonkers! There was a slight accident on a three lane road and the two cars could not move until a traffic police came and figured out who was in the wrong. So I saw a traffic police come towards the cars and the traffic was just building behind them. And then all this honking started. No one was going to move because everyone was blocked but they honked anyway. It’s as if the power of the honk will get traffic moving in front of them. Before this accident, I was walking across a laneway for a supermarket and a truck came behind me and nearly cracked me. I moved aside and he pulled up and stopped, only to start going in reverse. I think he started to go in reverse because he did not hit me the first time. So with a certain amount of agility (I say this with all humility), I sidestepped him and just missed hitting the front of the truck. That really annoyed me as it was a rather large truck and if I got hit, I would have been a little disturbed. So I turned around to look at the man and he was yelling at me – me! Thankfully Christian grace kicked in and I left the scene of the (almost) accident.
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