Dean and Paula Finnie - South Africa |
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Prayer Update June 2010
To our dear friends
We are entering into month full of football fever and excitement. South Africa really has gone 'football crazy' and are very proud hosts of the 2010 World Cup! We are excited to have tickets to a couple of matches and Joel is already planning his night out with Dad! Look out for us at the England v Algeria match on the 18th!!
In spite of this, there is much to be done in this land for the gospel and, as you can imagine, the church is doing all it can to jump onto the World Cup bandwagon in order to make the most of the opportunity. Grace Church is helping to play host to a very big community event on Saturday 5th June. The local HIV Peer Education Programme (led by a woman belonging to our church!) is hosting a pre-World Cup six-as-side football event in Macassar High School. It will be a 32 team knock out event and a fundraiser to raise funds for windows for many of the schools where they are running the programme. We are really excited about it and know that it will not only be a lot of fun, but also an enormous opportunity for the church to witness to the community. As such we have hired a gazebo and Dean is organising banners, fliers, tea, coffee and muffins etc. and lots of volunteers simply to be available to share the gospel. Please pray for this event.
We have continued to have some really excellent Training in the Word sessions on Wednesday nights lately, with more scheduled for June. Paula had the privilege of speaking recently about the big picture of the Bible and how the Old and New Testaments hang together. It was an exciting session. We are also looking at contextualising Bible verses and passages; what grace really means and the whole concept of atonement - wow!
Work continues apace with Grace Cares. Dean is holding a meeting tonight to talk through the many thoughts and ideas that we and others have been having about how we can effectively help the less fortunate in our community in a long-term, sustainable way. This promises to be another exciting and yet, no-doubt problematic area of church life and we would really value your prayers. As an example, having hung a new door for one of our church members, the member was later involved in a street fight borne out of jealousy! This is what we are dealing with. We are entering a spiritual realm when we look out for the poor and we do need spiritual protection please.
As always, Grace Community is still looking for land on which to build. This is always a difficult and 'political' area and we are and have been praying for a long time for a door to open. We urgently need space, and a building from which to really be the church in Macassar. Hiring the Civic Hall is not easy and we are often hampered in our planning by lack of a venue.
We continue to value your prayers for us as a family. With the advent of the World Cup all the children are having a 5-6 week holiday (2-3 weeks longer than normal) and many families are wondering what on earth they are going to do about this! There are wide spread reports of the high risk of child trafficking during June/July and we would ask you please to pray against this. We don't want fearful kids, but we must educated them about the potential dangers.
We are now almost half way through our Place of Safety Order with Hayden and, to be honest, very little has been done by Social Welfare to work through the issues with his family/find him a long term placement. This has made us angry and sad etc etc and we have had some quite difficult times with him, as you can imagine. However, we are continuing to pray that God would find the right family for this little boy. He is only just 3 and is desperately looking to belong - we know that God sets the lonely in families (Psalm 68), so please pray that the right one would be found. Joel and Eli are handling the situation very well on the whole and we are proud of them. They are both really looking forward to the school holidays, wishing we were going away (!), but glad not to have school in any event!
Thanks again for all your prayers, encouragements and continuing financial support. We really do value this very much and say a big thank you.
With love from
Paula, Dean, Joel and Eli