A New Form of Worship

The campus opened about two weeks ago. However, yesterday was the first day that I set foot on campus. The reason that there was such a long wait was because the protesting got worse once the campus opened. During that stretch my team and I found things to do around the city. We visited two orphanages and met with students from one of the local churches. We took two days to go to a little village on the Ghana and Togo border, tucked in the middle of a beautiful jungle. Other than that, there as been a lot of sitting around and waiting. Yesterday, on a whim, a couple of the leaders on my team went to ask the guards at the university if we could go on campus and if it was safe. They said yes, surprisingly, so we went.

Let me rewind a little to the night before. I couldn't sleep very well and stayed up praying. I felt very broken, helpless, and frustrated. Frustrated because I came all the way to Togo and hadn't done much. Helpless because, as hard as I tried, I couldn't accomplish what I felt I needed to. Broken because of the enormity of the God that I was presenting myself to. I desired so much for God to allow me to walk onto campus and spread his gospel. I remember begging God to allow me to serve him in this way. That night wasn't very different from the past two weeks. For these past two weeks this desire has been building up inside of me. It built up to the point that it was no longer something that I desired to do, but I began to see it as a form of worship that I desired to give to God. I begged God to allow me to worship him in this way. When we finally were allowed on campus my heart was full of so much joy at being able to share the gospel. It was the first time in my life that I experienced so much joy while evangelizing.

My prayer request remains the same, please pray for God to continue to provide safety for my team and I. Even today, a lot of the time that we spent on campus was time spent moving away from protestors and waiting for the military to pass. Even through this time of unrest, we've been able to share the gospel with non believers and have meaningful conversations with students about spiritual things. The hardest thing for myself and others on my team has been talking with Muslims. It's something that most of us have not done in the past. My prayer is that God would equip me with the knowledge to communicate the gospel effectively with these people.

Update

So I'm in Togo, for those of you that don't know. The second team, that was flying from Washington to Ghana, got turned around twenty minutes into their flight and delayed a day. Because of that, myself and the other guy that I was with, got to join their flight and get to Togo a little earlier than planned. A fight broke out on the initial flight to Ghana and one of the guys began threatening the flight attendants, so they decided to turn the flight around and return to Washington, which btw made national news and it turns out that the flight was escorted by fighter jets. Kyle, the guy I was with, and I had a flight to Washington, then Frankfurt, then Paris, then Togo. Our flight out of KC got delayed two hours and we missed our flight to Germany, but because the other team was still in Washington, we were able to join their flight and eventually made it to Togo.

When we all made it to Togo we found out that there had been some rioting at the university that we were supposed to work at and the military came in to shut it down. The general consensus among the Togolese is that the university should reopen soon, but we'll see. In the mean time, my group has gone through orientation and has been able to stock up on food. Yesterday our group leader went to buy clothes for the orphanage and the rest of us went to buy food for them, I was in charge of finding good rice. Other than that we've been finding things to do around town.

Tom, the missionary that prepared a lot of what we're doing, left to go to Niger, which means I am now the primary French speaker. This essentially is my first time in a Francophone country, meaning I've never really been able to use my French in a practical sense. On Sunday my group had to meet with some church/school officials to discuss a possible partnership. Only one of the officials spoke English, and it wasn't much better than my French, which meant I had to translate some of the dialogue between them and us. Even though I was nervous and a little worried that I wasn't translating it correctly, it felt awesome to finally use all the French that I've been taught.

If you fill anyone in that doesn't know about my situation that would be awesome. I'd also ask that those of you reading this continue to pray for my team and me, and that you'd specifically pray for the university to reopen so that we can begin to do more work. Thanks.