Dear Prayer Supporters,

I have arrived in Kathmandu safely and started teaching my first seminars this week. We just finished the 4th session of 11-session seminar of “A Pinch of Incense”. It is a week-long effort of covering the Christian movements in the first century Asian Minor. This will lead us to studying of Ephesians next week.

There are 23 attendees in a fairly crowed room, and those 23 pairs of eyes of the eager faces interact with me in every minute of the day, warming my heart and desires to enlighten them with some new knowledge that will be an encouragement in their faith walk. Here are some thoughts of this trip so far, comparing against my past experiences at other places.

• I am surprised with how internationalized this country is. Most of young people speak some English, few very good, and they seem to be very comfortable with interacting with foreigners. Practically half the store front signs on the street are in English. This fact leaves me with such an encouragement to think of the day when this land is fully evangelized in gusto with this “foreign religion” of Christianity.
• The Nepali language is much harder to grasp and pronounce than I thought. My effort of attempting to analyze and to bring some clarity to their Bible text based on my understanding of the language structure will have to be abandoned. This leaves me to depend completely on the translators and the point I will be making on my English Bible text. The good news is that the translator service provided so far are excellent.
• We are progressing the classes in faster pace than planned. People are very receptive, better grounded and catches on faster than I anticipated In the current pace, we will finish the whole planned program one or two days earlier than planned.
• The weather is nicer than home, the food is tolerable, the environment is pretty crowded and polluted, and so on. Not much different than what’s expected of less-developed country of this size. I am attaching few pictures.

Your prayers got me this far in relative ease through many of the difficulties mentioned previously and even some unspoken. I also personally feel much more at ease now and were able to focus on the progress since this train started rolling. Please continue to pray for this project in the following areas.

• I feel OK physically other than minor jetlag effect but am mindful of possibly losing voice and energy as we grind along every day. Also, this country is doing better than home but is still not completely out of COVID disruption. Please pray for the wellbeing of me and all attendees till the end.
• The room is too small to have desks for each person. They are trying really hard to write down as much as they can on notebooks on their lap. This also disrupts them from focusing on what I say and show on the screen. I don’t know if there is anything can be done about this but let’s pray that God will grant them super memory and concentration so that they can absorb without having to write down so much
• All these pastors came from many different parts of the country (they are from 5 different districts) and they met most of each other for the first time here. I have this wish, also I am sure it is of Pastor Bier (my partner who is organizing this) that these people will form a good, long-lasting fellowship among them while here as they are all housed in this building together for the next two weeks. Please pray for their unity and forming a good network for Kingdom work.
• There is no change in my wife Jane’s shoulder condition. They will run more scans next week. Thanks for your continued prayers for her.

I wish you all joyful Memorial Day weekend.

Jay

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