Life...and prayer.

First of all, thanks so much for your prayers for Sean's trip!  It seems to have been a very successful trip...more details to come about what they did and how it all went!

Our family is doing great.  We are extremely busy this holiday season but things are going so well.  We've lived in PalangkaRaya for a bit over a year now and it is really feeling like home.  We have hit our stride in family life, ministry, and relationships are growing, slowly.  We are so blessed.  Indeed, I am a deeper kind of content than I can ever remember being.  We are thriving and full of holiday cheer!

And yet, in the midst of all these blessings and joys, I am heavy-hearted.  Though my personal life is going so well, I am surrounded by the pain and suffering of lost and hurting people.  These are the people I am learning to love, and as I watch them endure the hardships of life I am undone.  I don't know how to make it all better.  I don't know how to help them see.  I barely know how to speak their language, let alone how to navigate murky cultural waters.  I feel unfit for any assistance but prayer.  And surely that is enough.  So I pray.

I pray for the little girl whose father does not want her.  He seeks desperately for some way to get her out of his way so he can continue in his drunken, selfish ways. She is unwanted, unloved, and I want so much for this not to be. I want her to have a stable home where she is loved and treasured, where she wouldn't have to fend for herself or fear for her future or lose sleep.  I want her to know that there is a Father in Heaven who loves her and holds her close in His lap, even if her earthly father has never shown her this kind of love.

I pray for the neighbors down the street, beating drums and carrying out old beliefs in order to ensure that their beloved grandmother can enter heaven.  They do this and yet, they claim to be followers of Christ.  And I wish I could make them see that these ways are not the ways of a true Christ follower, that they are still putting their faith in lies and no matter how much they love this old grandmother, they cannot make her way to heaven clear with all the drum beating and rituals in the world.

I pray for the wife who suffers an unhappy marriage.  Quietly.  I pray for her children, who have felt the sting of their father's temper.  And I pray for this husband and beg God to show him the better way.  I want to see healing in all marriages in this place, where showing affection for your spouse is nearly taboo, and where, though divorce is frowned upon, good, happy marriages are so rare.

I pray for the sweet single guy, to find the love of his life, just because I want to see him happy.  I pray for the young couple barely getting by on a small wage, with him so tired he can't stay awake at his job.  I pray for the family next door with money and privilege to spare and yet so much emptiness in their eyes.  I pray for my most precious friend in Indonesia (who I don't think realizes how dear she is to me, because I don't have the words) and for her family - so poor, so much required of them, yet willing to offer what little they have and share if it means God can be made known to others.  I pray for the believing man and his unbelieving wife.  I pray for the pastors toiling away in a dark corner and I pray for their harvest to come at last. 

Maybe you could pray too?  Because, maybe, just maybe, God has not brought me here to pass out answers and pat solutions but to simply pray...and to share these stories so that you can pray with me.