summer stuff...

Thank you for checking in here and praying with us for the U people.  Ramadan finished- and we're always glad for that.  We've been meeting with several local friends regularly recently...  a few believers and many more who have not yet trusted Christ.  There's been one particularly encouraging friend who seems to be seeing Jesus for Who He Is... though he's still very timid about telling anyone else that he probably doesn't count as a Muslim anymore.  And there have been hard things, like one friend who explain that she doesn't want to meet with us because she feels certain that we would influence her...  and another friend flat out rejected Christ and later explained that she must do this because of her ethnicity (in other words, not at all because of the issue of TRUTH.)  Sigh....(Self, release your heart and lift your eyes, remember the promise, the promises we're here for!)  

Other friends have moved away and new friends have come....

And the Father has graciously opened sweet new connections for the two of us to partner with a few more outstanding workers here.  There's been more spurring-sharpening-accountability fruit to show in our own hearts and lives and we pray that our joint efforts will result in much praise to our Father's glory in this place!  We praise God for these precious, dearly loved friends!

We have a new little buddy we call Asher, that we met on a walk through a neighborhood near us.  His mom explained that Asher has no dad, she raises him alone... his dad is in prison.  Right away I asked her to show me to her shop and we bought her fruit.  More fruit than we could eat.  And we stayed as long as we could, talking under the street lights, to hear more of her story... He's been in prison since the riots in our city in 2009, when she was pregnant with Asher.  He's never seen his dad.  Five more years til he gets out.  She hopes.  

And this very poor, beautiful, kind woman seems to me to be acutely wise and open to talk about Jesus, more so than most every other Uyghur I've met.  Please join us to pray that she would trust and follow Christ, that she would know His great love for her, that she would become an ambassador of Christ in her neighborhood...

Please also pray for "A"....  I said about him a year ago "when I think about how far he's come in understanding the Gospel and in beginning to love Jesus and in seeing  Christianity as good, it seems like he must have already decided to follow Christ.  But he hasn't.  He's just come really really far from where he started."  I said that a year ago?  And it's even more, much more, true of him now.  Please ask that the Lord would work in him through His Word and through others so that he wouldn't confuse his commitment to relationship with us with his need for commitment to the Lord.

Thank you for praying with us dear friends!!