Thankful For All The Thumbs In My Life

While we were back-translating with Bryan today, we had a bowl of peanuts on the table.  Peanuts are a huge staple of the Malian diet.  They'll eat them raw, sometimes roast them, and almost every sauce that we ate in our village was peanut-based (and we ate sauce almost every meal).  A lot of people have peanut fields, our village mom being one of them, and we helped work in the fields during planting season.  During hot season we'd literally sit outside on the ground shelling the harvested peanuts all afternoon.

One of our co-workers who knew what we'd be doing this week brought by 2 bags of roasted peanuts for us to serve during our work time.  This is certainly the polite thing to do and is a snack that appeals to all nationalities involved. :)

While Bryan was listening to one of the Stories, I looked over and saw that he was running his finger all through the bowl...you know...touching every single peanut in there.  He saw me looking at him and I'm sure I had a what-in-the-world-are-you-doing look on my face.  He said, "Can you pick it up like this?"  (meaning with one finger)  I tried, and sure enough I couldn't.  He said, "Here we have a saying: 'One finger cannot pick up the rock.'  Do you understand?  It means you can't do things alone, you should let somebody help you."  I said, "Well then you're our thumb!"  He thought I was crazy, but he agreed.  :)

So if you're reading this...thank you for being one of our thumbs!!!  Thank you for joining us in pr-yer and thank you for your support and encouragement along the way...it means so much.



Pr-yer Updates:

- We finished all of the back-translations this morning and then finished all of the re-recordings this afternoon!!  This is huge...something only G-d could do.  We will start the technical process tomorrow of putting these Stories onto something that is distributable, reproducible, and useable in the bush.  Pray once again for multiplication of time!

- Keep pr-ying for Bryan.  Today when he was back-translating, he couldn't think of the English word for "convert."  He said, "You know...it's like...when I become a Chr-st-follower, what would you say I did?"