L'accident

"L'accident" is french for "the accident".  Yes, French is a difficult language :)  Tuesday afternoon we had some visitors who planned to drop by.  We received a call from the husband saying that they had a wreck and had backed into a ditch.  I immediately drove down to find that had accidently backed off a small cliff, about 30 feet, on our road.  Thankfully they were not seriously injured, just bumps and bruises, even though one was pinned in the car for an hour before released.  We are thankful that they were okay.  The city had been promising to redo our road for a couple of years now, yesterday they had the surveyors looking at it.  We also had a few occasions to speak with some of the neighbors as a result.  The Bible study went well Thursday evening.  We had a good number thanks to several from Carcassonne, including a couple who are passing through that are planning to be missionaries in Mali.  They stopped by as well during the market on Friday morning.  The market went well, I passed out one Bible in English, and one in French.  Today, (Saturday), I had bible study with the teens this morning and this afternoon we visited with the new missionary couple some more and also worked on getting a youth meeting started with the Church in Carcassonne.  I don't know if I mentioned it already, but we did get our French Driver's licenses in the mail.  Looking forward to services tomorrow.  God bless, JASON

Outreach, Shopping, Hiking, & the Accident

Thursday I went to help out the church in Carcassonne with outreach. They had a door to door outreach in the morning. We paired up and went into the North African section of town and visited several apartment buildings. Things went well, we used as an opener and Bible Exposition that is being held at the church in Carcassonne during the week. Many were not home, several were clearly not interested, some did not speak French, some took some tracts and literature, some seemed real interested. Thursday afternoon I worked on finances. Our church has decided to help pay off the rest of our language school expenses and so I was working on getting the money into the account. It ended up not working out. Thursday night I went back to Carcassonne to an open air preaching they were having at the entrance to the walled city, a very popular tourist attraction year around. It was neat to watch the reaction of everyone to the preaching and singing. Many whispers about us being a kind of sect, most ignored us, some looked for a little bit, a few paid attention and stayed, some even talked with us (some foreigners).
Friday, I took Caleb for a father/son hike. We had a great time, we hiked up to the top of the hill behind our house. It was a difficult course considering our house is at 800 ft and the hill tops out at 1300 ft but he had no problems. He really enjoyed spending the time with daddy. Near the top he asked the ultimate question. “Dad, what happens to me if you die up here?” Friday afternoon we went to IKEA and got a few more things for the house.
Saturday – I cleaned up a lot in the yard today. Angie went and got the kids some school clothes. The exciting even happened while we were preparing for supper. Lilia walked into the living room with her cup of water. Suddenly she walks back in the saddest crying voice says, “I'm so dead.” I walked around to see that she had spilled water onto my laptop. I got it dryed up as best as I could while Lilia went to her room crying. Angie said, “I'll get my hairdryer to dry it out.” I held the laptop while she ran the hair dryer. Suddenly I smelt something burning, sure enough she had melted a half dozen of the keys to the keyboard. Evidently I am typing this on the keyboard so everything worked okay. I trimmed the melted edges off the keys and everything seems to be running fine. Keyboard just looks a little different. I had to assure Lilia that everything was okay and I was not mad before she would finally calm down. I will probably order a new keyboard just to be safe because the “ctrl” key is getting stuck even though it is not being pushed.
Services went good on Sunday. We enjoyed a visiting speaker who had been a missionary in France for 50 years. In the afternoon he gave a conference on Jean (John) Calvin that was very informative. We met a couple at the Church in Carcassonne this morning who had just moved to Magrie, the same town that we live in. Amazing. God bless, JASON