Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Cupcakes and Cruises

We are continuing to settle in here on the Africa Mercy and it is feeling more and more like home.  We have several boxes that we will not see until Guinea so we still have bare spots in our cabin but I know they will be filled soon enough.  Adalynn is beginning to learn her way around the ship and is very social with everyone.  She continues to sleep better and better and we are so thankful for this!  Thank you for your prayers! Cora has been so amazing and is just happy and content most of the time! 

 John has been busy working and learning his job.  It has been overwhelming at times but he's starting to learn the ropes.  Thankfully for him, life on the ship is a bit slower right now as the full crew is not yet here. . I know that a lot of work and activity is going on but it is hard to see it all since the hospital is not functioning at this point.  I’ve been told to enjoy this quiet time as things are about to pick up significantly.  We will have a couple hundred more people on board soon!

The rest of our team from Texas arrives on Thursday!! We are so excited to reunite with them.  The other 30 or so memebers of our training group spent the last 2 weeks in a village in Ghana doing a work project.  We miss them and Adalynn is very excited to see her friends again!

Saturday was John’s birthday and I was able to make some gluten free cupcakes to celebrate! 


Also on Saturday there was a huge cruise ship parked right next to us. It was amazing how tiny our ship felt next to the cruise ship! I wish I would have been able to get a picture side by side but here is the ship sailing past us out of the port.




Sunday we went to the beach. We were able to walk to the bus station and take the bus. . .we felt pretty adventurous taking a public bus with two small children, a stroller and all our beach stuff. Adalynn LOVED the water and the sand and we were all worn out after only a couple hours but it was well worth it.  Cora mostly hung out sleeping in the stroller as the sun was very hot and the water was a bit chilly.




Today the ship turned around as they needed access to the other life boat. Some of the crew is going through lifeboat training while we are here in Tenerife. We now have a new view of the island out our window!




Thank you for your continued prayers!  Please pray for the advance team that is in Guinea right now as they are preparing the way for our service there.  Everyone is very excited to be going back to Guinea after over 10 years!  We will set sail on August 15th!







Wednesday, July 25, 2012

The God of Light and Comfort


A pretty amazing thing happened in our family yesterday.  What started as something very frightful and disturbing had, we feel, a very positive end.  In our training in Texas we learned a lot about the dark spiritual side of many of the tribal religions in Africa.  This is a topic that we tend to avoid in America as we don’t often feel like we are exposed, in an obvious way, to the spiritual world.  In fact, I tend to kind of brush it aside as if it is not real.  But it is very real and we were given training to help us understand when we encounter these things.  Well, we are not in Africa yet, but we have already been learning a little more about these Spiritual things.

Ever since we moved onto the ship Adalynn has been screaming every time we try to put her to bed at night.  Adalynn has always been a great sleeper.  She has slept in 7 different beds in the last 2 months and always takes a couple days to fully adjust but after that she gets right back into her routine.  She has been known to cry at night when we put her down, especially in a new place, but we had never heard her scream like she has since we’ve been here.  Her screams were not just screams of discontent but rather screams of fear.  We have had to lie in her room with her until she goes to sleep.  Several nights it has taken several hours to get her to go to bed.  It has been totally exhausting for us, and also very worrisome.

I am not one to automatically blame “the dark side” for things like this, but in this case I felt strongly that there was something spiritual going on.  Something was making her room feel scary.  She was fearful of something that we could not understand.  We wondered if we had made a bad decision to come here.  We wondered why God would call us to this and allow it to be so difficult.  We doubted the direction that we had so clearly heard to leave everything and move our family here.  We spent hours praying and many tears were shed.  Everything else felt right, but this.

Yesterday we invited one of the chaplains and another woman to come into our cabin and pray over Adalynn’s room.  It was a very powerful time and both women really felt like something supernatural was going on to make her fearful.  As I was standing praying I felt an amazing peace and security knowing that the Lord is bigger than darkness and He is more powerful than anything else.  Satan will try anything to discourage us and this is exactly what he was trying to do.  But the Lord is bigger.  We have no reason to fear.

I know it may take some time for Adalynn to totally feel comfortable here, but she went to bed last night and tonight without screaming and that felt like such an amazing answer to prayer.  We feel so encouraged.  We know we are supposed to be here.  One of the women told us that she felt God telling her that He has a special plan just for Adalynn here.  She’s not here just because John and I were called here but he is going to use her in a specific way too!!  That was SO amazing to hear and to realize!  It made us so aware of how faithful we HAVE to be in relying on God’s awesome power!  We cannot do this alone.  We will fail.  Only God in us can do this.

I have not felt God’s power in quite that way before and instead of discouragement I feel such a sense of strength and confirmation of our calling to this ship.  It makes me so excited to see what God has in store for our family.  It makes me excited to know that he plans to use all four of us to bring glory to Him!
Some pictures from our week:
 Reading to Cora!

Cora chillin on the deck 


 Adalynn loves the lello swings on Deck 7.  There are also riding toys and a play house (in the distance).  On Deck 8 there are more little cars and a slide.  It's a great place for them to play but it is so dirty. . .

note the black face and legs!

All our walls are magnetic and Adalynn thinks that is pretty amazing!  We think so too.  We use magnets to hang everything on the wall. 


Play-dough!
We turned our couch to face the windows and we love watching the big boats and bips (ships) come into the port. 


3 months!


Look what I can do!!!

Saturday, July 21, 2012

First Days on the Africa Mercy

Yay!! We arrived on the ship late Thursday night after a very long 24 hours of traveling. The girls really did an amazing job and we were thankful for answered prayers about the travel. On our flight from London to Denver we had 2 extra seats next to us and so Adalynn was able to lie down and sleep for 4-5 hours! Cora slept most of the time when she wasn't eating. People around us were pretty amazed at how well they did. We were so thankful for the Lord's traveling mercies!

We have now been on board for 1 1/2 days. It is so exciting to finally be home. We were able to get all of our stuff unpacked and put away yesterday so our cabin feels a little more like home. We have some more things that we sent on the contanier to get here but we won't get them until we arrive in Guinea. We are now in Tenerife on the Canary Islands just off the coast of Africa. It is a group of islands that belongs to Spain. It is ruggedly beautiful from what we have seen so far.

Life on the ship has been pretty good so far. We got a tour of the ship yesterday and were able to see most of it in about an hour. Adalynn got to play on the swings that are hanging from the deck. There is a good railing and netting so there is no fear of her being to close to the edge! People have been very welcoming and really love the girls! Our cabin location is really great--near the laundry, ice maching (Adalynn is especially glad about this), the cafe and the internet! It feels a little smaller than the pictures made it look but it seems to be plenty of space. Adalynn is really excited that all the walls are magnetic so she has been playing with magnets a lot. She is not sleeping real well yet, which may be partially due to jet lag and partially due to the fact that our AC is not working. It is VERY hot. It is supposed to be fixed in the next couple weeks sometime so we are hopeful for that. Cora hasn't missed a beat and seems to be adjusting fine.

It's a bit overwhelming and surreal to be here but also so great to finally be settled.  We are glad it is the weekend and we can relax a little. John will start his job on Monday.  The ship is pretty quiet right now as the hospital will not be operational again until Guinea.  We are thankful that we can transition onto the ship during this quieter time but we are also excited to see how the hospital functions.  Thank you for your continued prayers!


                                                                                     About to take our first walk up the gangway!


      View from our cabin into the ocean

                                                                                                  View from our cabin towards Tenerife

       We took a walk along the dock, this is the view back down looking at the ship.


     It was nice to be outside!

               You can see the ship in the distance.  The ship on the right is a ferry that goes between islands.

Our cabin

        Kitchenette in our cabin



 Our friends loaned us their bouncy seat.  Cora loves it!!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Texas in a nutshell


We leave next Wednesday for the ship!  It feels like all of a sudden and finally here all at once.  I’d like to sum up our time in Texas but I’m not sure that is possible.  Now that we are at the end of these 5 weeks  I can say this time has been really good.  It has stretched and grown us in new ways and we are grateful for that.  We feel as ready and prepared as we think is possible.  Much of what we have to learn is yet to come and we hope that we are entering this next phase of our lives with open hearts to what God wants to teach us.

Part of the focus of our time here in Texas was on what missions is really about.  This was the part of the training that hit home the most for us.  I (Tracey) have always had a fear of going into missions as the rich white people coming to save the day for the poor starving Africans.  I know that I don’t want it to be this way, but unfortunately that is what relief and development often looks like.  I am still a long way from totally understanding God’s plan in missions but I do feel like we have gleaned some wisdom from our training that is really key in serving the people of West Africa.

For our final project here we had to come up with something that showed what we had learned.  I wrote this acrostic and I think it really does sum up what I want my heart to be as we board the Africa Mercy and open our lives to being used.

Meet them in the work they’re already doing

-if the work we do is to have any lasting value we must join alongside the people of the country to help them reach goals that they already have and help implement ways to helping them attain those

Invest in them as people first

-Jesus loved people.  He was not just out to heal the sick but to love them and draw them to himself.  Our role is the same.

Serve them with humility

-We may think we have all the right answers to their problems but it is not our job to think for them.  We are there to serve them and not ourselves.

See the world through their glasses

-We all have a different view of the world based on how we were raised and in order to serve them well I have to try to understand the world through their eyes

It is the work of God alone

-The best way to make a mess of things is to think for any amount of time that what we are doing is our own.  This is God’s work that we are joining in, not our work that we are asking him to join us in.

Only God receives the credit

                -Our motivation is the Kingdom of God, not a pat on our own backs

No agenda of my own

                -How many nations have been hurt by the agendas of others being imposed on them?

Salvation’s truth is for everyone

-Biblical truth is truth for every generation of every nation.  We are not bringing “our” religion to them we are helping them to see the truth of Jesus that has already been revealed to them



Please pray for us that we would live this out in our lives aboard the ship.  Please pray also for our flight as we are a bit apprehensive flying that far with two lap children.



On a lighter note, here are some recent pics from our time in Texas:

Last weekend we went to the zoo!


      Adalynn was in charge of the zoo map.

  It was REALLY hot. This was just before our snow cone break.


  The fishies were Adalynn's favorite.  Maybe it was the air conditioning!





 Last weekend we spent 2 days with our friends the DeLisi's who live near Tyler.

  6 of the 11 DeLisi kids entertaining Cora.



We said goodbye to Grandma on Wednesday. She was here for 4 weeks helping with the girls. We were so greatful to have her here!