I decided recently that I would reread the entire Bible starting at the beginning. I would like to use this forum to highlight a line that struck me while reading last night. Genesis 29:4 reads “Jacob asked the shepherds, “My brothers, where are you from.”” (NIV) I’ve read this before, but never as a missionary. How beautiful it is to encounter strangers and to address them as brothers before knowing anything about them. What a beautiful moment in Jacob’s life to encounter a new place with such confidence in his God. The God of Jacob is the creator of all things, the Father is the father over all people. The God of Jacob is the same God we worship today. All of us have but one father, we are all brothers and sisters and this phenomena is not restricted to include only those people we may meet at church. Psalm 139 explains God’s presence in the lives of each of us before those lives began.
Vissy and I worked on putting up the walls for the gabina today. A gabina might be called a generator room in English. It is a small house designed to protect the back-up power supply for the church. I confess to never having built with brick or block before. In Washington we typically build structures out of wood. The gabina has an interior and an exterior wall, both made of brick with a sheet of peshkbuk (Styrofoam) sandwiched between them to aid in the dampening of sound. Our structure is now one meter tall. Tomorrow we will cap the bricks with a continuous, re-bar reinforced cap called a brez. Once that has had time to set we will build the walls to their final height of 2.2 meters.
I was outmatched by Vissies pace at laying brick today. By the end of the day he was calling out his own name in a dampened shout “Reka!” Anyone who has ever shot baskets alone while giving themselves a three second count-down knows what this sounds like. “And the crowd goes wild! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” That’s when you let the ball fly and it tanks off the rim at which time you have to chase it down and give yourself the benefit of a shot from the free-throw line.
Yli and his assistant are wasting no time getting the tile in the bathrooms laid. You can always tell a good tile man by the way tile on the wall reflects light. Only perfectly laid tiles will show reflections flawlessly. If there is no break in the light as it shows on the wall then you can be certain that it is as flat as a mirror. Yli is a good tile man, and a good man besides.
albaniacalling 