11 February

Dear brothers and sisters,

I hope you are all doing well. A lot has been going on the last several days since I sent an update. I will try to be brief and give you a quick feel for what is happening.

Over the last 2 days the hamattan, or dust storm, has blown in. The dust is blown in from far away in the Sahara desert, and can go all the way through Nigeria. It is hard to describe, but it looks like a thick fog, but it is actually dust,. It covers everything, and you can taste and smell it all the time. The good thing is that it almost totally blocks out the sun, so it is much cooler during the day. Rich said it can be so thick sometimes that it becomes totally dark in the middle of the day. This is not nearly that bad, but between the dust and the smoke from fires, visibility is really poor at dusk, and it is impossible o feel clean. I am putting a picture taken from the window of the discipleship school. What appears to be fog is actually the dust.






On Monday, I taught in the Tamrorro church. This is the village where our congregation paid for a new building. They are very thankful for the new building, and received me warmly. They are a very healthy church; many pastors have come from Tamrorro. I taught at a Monday evening meeting, and we had a great time of worship and opening the Word together. The village chief, who is a Muslim that is friendly to the ministry here, came to the meeting and listened as I taught on Christ, the Word, and the Church. He did not give his life to Christ, but he heard the gospel again, and we continue to pray for him. Below is a picture of me with most of the congregation, outside of the new building we gave them.




We have also continued to do evangelism in the villages. We have done a number of large villages which had big crowds come out to hear the Gospel. I went to a village called Kwassou which I had never visited before. A lot of people came, and some even asked questions, but no one wanted to publicly profess Christ. I did pray for a young girl with a large bulge at the base of her spine, that is apparently caused by leakage from spinal bifida. The doctors have not been able to do anything, but Christians have been praying for her, and she has started walking. We prayed for her and encouraged them to keep looking to Jesus for healing and salvation.

Today we went to Gangarra, which is the largest village in this area. Durant was preaching, and there was a massive crowd. In fact, it was hard to be heard. Durant did an excellent job, and one young man came forward to receive Christ, and quite a number came forward to have us pray for healing. God seemed to touch a number of these, and many good seeds were sown in the village, which has a healthy church. To give you a feel for the crowd, which reminded us of the story in the Gospels where Jesus had to get in a boat to avoid being crushed, I am including a picture below. As you can see, there were a lot of kids, but also a lot of adults came.



I will close for now. Please continue to pray for us. We teach in the discipleship and leadership school every day for 3 hours, and then we split up and go to 2 villages each day (and some of these take well over an hour of driving through the bush to get to), and we will also be teaching in a city church tomorrow. Please ask God to use us, to strengthen the believers, and to open the hearts of the lost in the villages.

I miss you all greatly, and look forward to seeing you next week.


In Christ,


Bret