Our first visitors came this morning at 8:00. We needed to send a gift to the palace; it was not proper for us to go ourselves so we had to choose someone to go for us. Red brought one of his friends to take our gift to the Ya-Na; so much pomp and circumstance. All this going and coming and taking gifts reminds us of Old Testament times. Today’s gift was not a monetary gift; today we sent 100 kola nuts; they are supposed to be presented in a calabash gourd bowl but we did not have one so we put them in an attractive gift bag. I can’t remember the name of the man that was presenting the gift for us but he told us that we would send 100 kola nuts minus 1 for each of us. We all took one kola nut out of the bag. I asked if the Ya-Na would be annoyed when there were not exactly 100 kola nuts in his gift. They laughed and said it is tradition to take out a few nuts; besides they said the Ya-Na never counts the Kola nuts, he just passes them out to his guests. They said that he never counts the money in any of the money envelopes either. You know I would be counting everything!
As soon as they left we headed to Kulkpeni for the monthly evangelist / church leaders’ class. They had a good number of men attend today’s class. I think the final number was 28. The men reported 27 baptisms and 5 restorations. Not bad for a month’s work.
When we walked in the church building we noticed that a couple of the men were wearing face masks. Ghana still has mandatory rules about face masks in public places and social distancing. I had made lots of masks while we were in the states. We quickly started passing out the face masks and Steve had a little talk with them about following the ministry of health guidelines and the importance of wearing the masks. Everyone kept the masks on for the rest of the class.
The ladies at Bethel have been diligently working on class material for the congregations that we work with. The men were excited and grateful to get their hands on class material for children. Today they got flip charts and a large bag to keep everything in. Not all of the men are the Bible class teachers; they will pass the material on to the teachers.
A couple of the churches needed help with their church buildings. Thanks to all of you who give us money for evangelism or “whatever comes up”. Thanks to your generosity we were able to help 2 churches get metal doors for their buildings.
Thank you for all you do for us and for the churches and people in Ghana.
In His Service,
Steve and Kandie
