Preaching, Teaching, and Praying for poop

By Jordan Stineman

Hello from Ghana!

First off I just want to say thank you for your prayers. They are felt by the entire team, especially in those times when we rely on the Spirit completely. We have had a lot of those moments already, as this trip is forcing every one of us out of our comfort zones.

Today was our first full day of work. We woke up to eat breakfast (delicious) at 8am and headed off to the church/school that our host Pastor Daniel heads up. We were surprised to learn a few days ago that we would be teaching children for the next two weeks, and some of us felt more capable than others right off the bat. Getting to the school and seeing the kids for the first time was a mixture of excitement, and nervousness, and left us all wishing we knew more Fonti (the native language of the region we are living in). We jumped in with a few songs and a puppet show and we were off and rolling. The schedule is set up so that after group time we all have three 30 minutes class periods with our students. We all have different age groups, and most of us have between 5 and 9 kids. I have a class of 9 students, they are probably first graders in the US. My kids were slow to come out of their shells during the grammar lesson, but once we started adding and subtracting suckers they mysteriously became more enthused. I had a blast teaching and everyone felt accomplished by the time we left our first teaching encounter.

The second major task of the day was to go out into the outskirts of town to the village areas and do street evangelism. These areas house the poorest of the poor and are for the most part very hard to take in. We each broke up into groups of either 2 or 3 (plus a translator) and set out in different directions searching for people to talk to. I think that we were all nervous to start, but by the time we met back at the van an hour later we all had smiles. The group i was in consisted of Zack Yarbrough, our translator Dorothy, and myself. We had 4 or 5 conversations before our time was up, and I feel like we did a lot of good. One boy of about 16 gave his life to Christ and it seemed genuine; I am anxious to see if he comes to the church service we invited him to on Sunday. Our most incredible encounter came when we spotted a woman named Aggie. She was slouched on her porch and said that her leg hurt. When we approached both Zack and I could detect an almost hateful presence about her. The look on her face was telling us to leave. What was incredible was that by the time we had prayed for her, her appearance had changed dramatically and she almost seemed to be a new person. Praise God!

The tie that bonds this team is the frequency of our bowel movements. Strange? Yes. But we all share the common cause of digestion issues in a foreign country. Some are constipated and others only wish they were (which makes for some awkward prayer requests at evening devos). At dinner they served us the most amazing pineapple (it's white, not yellow) and most of us dug in knowing what awaited us later that evening. Some of us got more sick than other; I saw Seth Swihart waddling around more than anyone else. I actually haven't had it too bad. What is awesome to me is how close this team is; we discuss poop and we don't feel ashamed about it. Some poop conversations are not blog appropriate, but if you want to go down that road Scott Hicks is your man.

Thank you so much for following! Keep praying and we hope to blog again soon! God bless!