Serve the Lord With Gladness

Psalm 100 exhorts us to present ourselves to God with thankful song and joyful service because “He is good and his steadfast love endures forever; his faithfulness to all generations.” Northern Togo may not be on anyone’s top travel destinations list, but we are so thankful that God has directed us here. He has given us good and meaningful work to do! Over the last couple of months we have heard time and time again about the fruitful labor at the Hospital of Hope, at Hope Radio, in the town of Mango, and in surrounding villages. What we had anticipated being a meager year because of such a shortage in our personnel has turned out to be a year of great blessing. God continues to provide for us and sustain us. It has not been easy and we have all been stretched, but we have continued to see His transforming power at work. Over Christmas break, while our kids were all here and we were off from school, we were able to participate in many different activities. We visited patients in the cuisine, served meals at the prison, counted pills at the pharmacy, helped with an end-of-year party for the hospital staff, rounded with the chaplains, toured the radio, got hands-on nursing experience, and led some worship services for the missionaries. Since our days are typically spent in a classroom setting, it was wonderful to get to participate in all these other ministries that our colleagues are involved in. Please continue to pray that God will provide a team leader to oversee and coordinate all these different efforts. There is so much going on each day!

We feel that the second half of this year is going to fly by. Our family is responsible for leading the worship services for our missionary team on Sunday nights during the month of February, so we have been preparing music and messages for those four weeks. Valerie will get to attend a Refresh Youth Retreat for all the Togo MKs down in Tsiko next month and she is really looking forward to that. In March we will need to take a trip down to Lomé so that Valerie can take the SAT. And then school will be wrapping up at the end of April so that we can fly back to attend Sierra’s college graduation in May and prepare for David and Sierra’s wedding in June. Although we have not purchased our plane tickets yet, we plan to be in the US for our summer break and would love to schedule some dates to connect with you, our supporters. Please reach out if you would like us to come share a report (with lots of pictures!) about what God is doing in northern Togo. We have some additional training to do at ABWE headquarters and will need to be up to 100% of our support requirements in order to receive financial clearance to return to Mango in the fall. We are so grateful for your generous support over the last three years, and we look forward to what God will continue to do in the year ahead as we joyfully serve Him.