Freely Giving

The guard's boys stand where the bed should be
and help recover whatever possible.

We’ve had another up and down week, with the sad turn of events of a fire at the church run guest house. The other co-worker who arrived here with us to work with our partner church was still living in the guest house, and her room and majority of things were completely torched. The fire appears to have been caused by a problem with the electrical wiring, and fortunately our friend was not home at the time. But she has a lot of work to do to figure out how she will recover from the tragedy, where she will live next and how to work with the insurance provided through our sending organization.

Our partner church’s prospects are even bleaker though. No one has insurance for this type of thing, and so now they’ve lost a big asset that was donated to help them generate income in the future. Because of the fires at churches and homes earlier this year there are already much higher priorities for using relief funds, and so it looks like it will be a long time before they’re able to pursue restoring this facility. But in another big surprise to us, the church leadership’s first action the day after the fire was to give our co-worker a gift of relief money the same as what they have planned to give to their own members who lost everything. Quite a huge gesture from a church that has next to nothing in their bank account on a regular basis.