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Hartley Blog
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Hartley Blog
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The Ghost Town
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Location: Blogs Missionary Musings |
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| Posted by: hartleyadmin |
5/14/2007 |
Happy Mother’s Day to all you Moms out there!
I am going to try my attempt at BLOGGING! I have been sending out weekly updates to some family, missionary committee folks, the committed prayer warriors on our team and some unlucky former friends who now get tons of missionary spam emails from us! Hopefully this way a few others of you interested in the comings and goings of a missionary couple in South Africa can periodically check in as well and catch up on our news.
We had a full, interesting week prior to Mother's Day – thank you for your prayers. Last minute Dan was asked to step in and teach at a conference that our boss wasn’t able to attend. We drove 5 hours north to a place called Piet Retief and Dan and our teammate Craig taught on leadership on Tuesday. Then we drove 3 hours that night to Swaziland and then Wednesday our teammate John gave a report on the nationwide research project our team is spearheading at the Conferences of Churches. It is a week long meeting where 200+ evangelical pastors get together for teaching and encouragement. The research project will help us find exactly where all the churches are – a GPS sort of research project – and then we will have several hundred pastors do a Needs Survey which would let us know what to teach at conferences in their area. It is amazing how the Lord continues to open doors for us. At that meeting we met the Minister of Home Affairs for the nation. He came to read a speech from the Prime Minister and give an address. He has a police escort and everything! We stuck out a little – the only 4 white people in this room crammed with Swazis – and in his speech he honored missionaries that work in the nation. We wanted to thank him afterward and it turned out that this man had been closely associated with OC years ago and was a key player in the 1995 research project that was done in Swaziland. He said that finding OC again made his day!
After John’s presentation we drove another couple hours up to Bulembu (www.bulembu.org) and chatted with Pastor Kevin about working on a project there. At each place we were able to talk in person with pastors our short term team will work with so that is why I went along also. I think Dan drove around 15 hours in 2.5 days – LONG road trip. J There were a couple 4x4 roads which made the trip more interesting! We also found an honest to goodness ghost town on our way home. It was deserted in the late 70s (according to signs still posted) because it used to be a mining town that mined asbestos. It has everything though, houses, a hospital, a golf course and club, restaurants, a playground and about 30 deserted houses in perfectly good condition. There are only 3 people that live in this town that could accommodate probably 500. It was fun to dream about what the Lord could do with a place like that. It already has a hospital for the destitute, homes for orphans, a missions/trade school and a golf course for tourism money to support it all. It’s fun to think of the wildest ministry ideas here because we have heard stories of God doing even wilder things.
Next week will be quieter for us – a couple meetings here and there and we are having a couple pastors’ families over for dinner. We are hoping to finalize more details for the short term team also.
Thank you for your love and prayers!
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