Month: January 2025

Posted on

Made Alive

Over the last couple of months Selina and I have been studying the book of Ephesians with two other couples. When studying Ephesians 2, I was struck anew by the language we see in verses 1-5. These verses are as follows:

“1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins 2 in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient. 3 We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, 5 made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!” (emphasis mine)

As human beings created in God’s image, we are capable of absolutely incredible things. Mankind has created means of transportation in cars, trains and planes that make trips that used to take months (or years!), able to be completed in just hours. We have created phones and computers that allow us to talk (even with video) with anyone, anywhere in the world with essentially no delay. We have created programs that allow real-time translation so even language barriers can be overcome. We have built spacesuits and rockets that have allowed humans to travel outside of our atmosphere and even land on the moon, and then safely return again to Earth. We have created medical equipment that allows surgeons to remove someone’s defective heart and replace it with a working one. Amazing!

As human beings we have accomplished some truly incredible things. We invent, create, build and construct. We fine-tune, adjust, renovate and improve. We fix, repair, resolve, remedy and restore. We can even mend, cure and heal with the right equipment and medicines. However, despite all of these things that we can do and have done, there is still something we can’t do. We can’t make that which is dead alive. No human has ever made life. That which is dead, remains dead despite our greatest ideas, achievements and creations. To “make alive” is the work of God.

You may have heard it said that humans have a sin problem. We do, but to say it like this doesn’t necessarily communicate the severity of the situation. We don’t have a sin problem like we may have a mouse problem in our basement. A quick call to the exterminator or a few mouse traps and our problem is resolved. There are solutions at our disposal to solve that kind of problem. Ephesians 2:1-5 tells us, rather, that our sins have made us spiritually dead. Not sick from sin. Not injured from sin. Not beset by sin. We are dead because of our sins. And the thing about being dead is that once you are dead, there is nothing you can do. It’s just like with our physical lives. While we are sick or injured we have means to try and get better. Once we are dead, there is nothing we can do. It’s over. There is no hope left.

And that is our spiritual reality apart from Christ. We are dead in our sins. There is no amount of good deeds, asking for forgiveness, making amends, praying, tithing or anything else we do that we think brings us favor with God, that can make even one iota of difference in our standing before God. We are already dead. We are dead and without hope in and of ourselves.

Thankfully, we have a God who has the power to make alive that which was was once dead. And that is exactly what He has done in Christ. Even though we were dead, we have been made alive in Christ. And verse four tells us that God makes us alive not because we have earned it, but because of who He is. The God of the universe who created the heavens and the earth is rich in mercy and He loves us. He loves you. He loves me. He loves the people of Senegal. It’s God’s love that motivated Him to send His Son to die and receive the judgement for our sin, and then to raise him back to life, conquering death. And it is only because of this act that we can go from spiritually dead to spiritually alive. By ourselves we are dead and without hope, but in Christ we are made alive and the hope of our salvation is secured. Praise be to God forever and ever!

– Adam

Posted on

Africa Eco Race

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to take Mia and Desmond to watch the final stage of the Africa Eco Race which finishes at Lac Rose, about an hour outside of Dakar. If you have never heard of this race, you are in good company. We knew nothing about it before moving here.

This year there were 156 racers in 121 vehicles (motorcycles, quads, cars, SSVs and trucks) that departed from Monaco on December 28, 2024 with the goal of navigating the 12-stage course through the deserts and dunes of Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal, arriving at Lac Rose on January 12, 2025 (picture below).

We knew some other missionary families that attend this event each year so I thought it would be fun to bring the two big kids to it since they really like a show called Blaze about a monster truck who often does races. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect, but it ended up being a very neat experience!

The final stage of the race has the drivers driving down the coast right on the ocean. We were sitting right at the corner where they come off the beach and turn inland toward Lac Rose. As each vehicle type comes through the leaders are followed by a helicopter which is filming from above. This ended up being the highlight of the day! One time, the helicopter came in super low and even dragged its tail through the sand, which could have ended very poorly if the pilot hadn’t recovered so well. There is a picture and video of this below!

The other highlight of the trip for the kids was simply playing in the dunes. While I enjoyed watching all the vehicles come through, Mia and Desmond spent half their time just playing in the sand. Over the last week and half the kids have not stopped talking about the outing, and I have not stopped finding new piles of sand in our car 😀 We definitely hope to attend the race again in the future!

– Adam

The tail scrape!
Picture of the tail scrape!

Posted on

The Bible in my language…I’ve never heard of that!

I have been meeting with Pape (not his real name) for over a year now to study the Bible in English. While Pape has a very good level in English, his mother tongue or first language is Soninke. The Soninke people group are primarily located in Mali but are represented across West Africa, including some 400,000 people here in Senegal according to Joshua Project.

For Christmas I wanted to get Pape some Scripture in Soninke. I started asking around for where I might be able to find this and was connected with another missionary, who I will call Bill, who has been working amongst the Soninke people for the last 30 years. While Bill lives in another city in Senegal, he was currently in Dakar along with some of his Soninke colleagues in order to do a final reading and revision of the Soninke New Testament translation.

So Bill invited me to come over and meet him and some of his colleagues and I asked to bring Pape along. As we were driving over, I told Pape about the translation work being done. He told me that he had never seen or heard of a Bible in Soninke and was very interested to see what this meeting would be like.

Bill and his team warmly welcomed us and told us about the work they were doing. We spent about 75 minutes together talking and looking through the printed Scripture resources they had. Pape was able to meet Bill as well as three Soninke men working on the translation, one of whom is a follower of Jesus. As far as I know, this is the first Soninke believer that Pape has ever met! Pape chose several of the Soninke resources, including the Gospel of Matthew to take home. They also shared with him several online resources in Soninke, including the Jesus Film.

It was a truly incredible experience! The whole time we were there you could see the joy on Pape’s face as he interacted with other Soninke men and looked through several Bible texts written in his own language. After we left, he just kept telling me. “A Bible in Soninke, I’ve never heard of that!” and told me he is going to show it to some of his family and friends. Bill also invited Pape to come back over the following two weeks to join them as they read the whole New Testament out loud in Soninke and make their final verifications.

Growing up as an English speaker, I have never had an experience like this before. The Bible is, and always has been, so easily accessible to me. To see the joy it brought Pape to read God’s Word in his own language for the first time is not something I will ever forget. Please join me in praying for the following things:

  1. That as Pape reads God’s Word and watches the Jesus Film in his own language, that God would reveal Himself to Pape in a way that He has never experienced.
  2. That Pape would share these Scripture resources with his family and friends and that other Soninke people could experience God’s Word in their own language for the first time.
  3. For an ongoing relationship between Pape and the Soninke believer. This believer lives in Mali, but they did exchange phone numbers. Please pray for a friendship to form and for Pape to see that following Jesus is not just for Toubabs (the Wolof word used here in Dakar for white people).
  4. That Pape might go back and spend more time with the translation team, listening to the reading of God’s Word.
  5. Ultimately, that God’s Spirit would work through His Word, drawing Pape into a relationship with Himself.
  6. Please pray also for the two Soninke men who are not yet followers of Jesus but are working on the Bible translation. Pray that their eyes would be opened to who Jesus is and that they would choose to follow Him.

– Adam

Posted on

More Driving (and Ticket) Fun!

Driving here in Dakar continues to be a deep well of opportunity for cultural experiences. A few weeks ago I was heading home from some errands with the kids when I was once again pulled over by a traffic cop. It is hard to explain this here, but I was pulled over for crossing between two paved roads through this little packed down path of sand about 5 meters long. This path is well worn down because (and I don’t think I am exaggerating here) thousands of cars drive over it every day. There is no sign saying it is illegal to make this cross over. It is not paved, but most roads here aren’t so that doesn’t mean much. And you can see the worn in path because so many people drive it. If you are familiar with the term “desire path”, “social trail” or “cow trail” this is much like that, only with vehicle traffic rather than foot traffic.

Anyways, on this particular day there was a cop sitting right next to this path and he pulled me over and was insistent that what I did was illegal. As I sat there I counted more than 25 cars drive past me on the same path, but that didn’t deter him. So he wrote me a ticket and took my license which meant I would need to go downtown the following day to get it back. I will admit that it was one of those days when I was just feeling frustrated with some of the everyday struggles of living in Dakar, particularly with driving. So after this happened I confess I was far from being in a cheerful mood or having an attitude of gratefulness.

Anyway, the next day I went downtown after work to the police station to get my license back. This is the third time I have done this and each visit has been a totally unique experience. This time when I walked in, the place was practically empty. Usually there are about 40 guys sitting in the lot also trying to get their licenses back, but this time I saw only one other guy there. So I walked up to a police officer and asked him where I needed to go. He pointed me in the direction of an office, but before I could go another officer came up and asked me for my ticket. This is a rough recollection of how our conversation went from there:

Cop: Ahh, the athlete!
Me (while laughing totally confused): Huh, who is saying that?
Cop: I am!
Me: (still laughing uncomfortably while having no idea what he is talking about) Ah ok. I do try and stay in shape.
Cop: Yeah I see you running every morning.
Me: What? Really?
Cop: Yeah in Hann Maristes (the neighborhood where we live)!

From there he went on to tell me how he also lives in Hann Maristes and regularly sees me out running in the morning near his house and near where he takes his taxi every morning to come to work. In a city of more than three million people these types of encounters are very rare as you’d imagine so I was totally shocked. We ended up chatting for a few minutes and exchanged names and I told him to yell at me next time he sees me out running!

He then went into an office (a different one than where my license had been the previous two times so I still have no idea what their system is) and brought me back my license and told me I didn’t need to pay anything. All in all I was at the police station for probably less than 10 minutes which absolutely smashes my previous record at this station!

This experience felt like such a pointed gift from God after the mood I had been in the day before. I left the police station thankful for having the opportunity to be there that day and make this new connection. It’s a good reminder to me that God is at work in all the small details of our lives and that when I hold too tightly to my expectations/desires/timetable, I risk missing what God has for me in that moment, whether that be something to learn, an opportunity to grow or a new relationship to form. I am thankful I serve a God who doesn’t rely on me getting it right in order for Him to accomplish His plans. And I am sure I will have another opportunity like this (i.e. get another ticket) in the not too distant future 😀

– Adam

Posted on

Grace Upon Grace

I had a very wise mentor remind me a couple months ago that God gives us “grace upon grace”. She was expressing this as something the Lord had been reminding her of at the time, but also as an encouragement to me. At the time of this conversation I was entering the first trimester with baby no. 4 while also tackling being a first time homeschooling mom living overseas. As a seasoned homeschool mom herself she was speaking from experience that there is certainly a learning curve to the homeschool life just as there is with anything. Given our life circumstances she was offering it as an extra encouragement to rest in God’s grace, especially when things didn’t go exactly as I planned or hoped with homeschool. A big part of this seems to be weighing out my expectations for myself as a teacher, for my kids as students, as well as what we can reasonably accomplish each day with a 1st grader, preschooler and a 1 year old.

“Expectation” is a theme that just keeps popping up as I can find myself trying to “measure up” to expectations in other areas as well such as who I should be as a missionary. Whether it’s from assuming our supporters have certain expectations of me or comparing myself to the other missionaries whose newsletters show up in my inbox it can be a vicious game and one that does not take into account God’s grace or sufficiency in my life. In each area of life I am guilty of playing this game – mother, wife, teacher, homemaker, language learner etc. etc. etc.

Suffice it to say that I need to be regularly (like daily? or hourly? or minutely?) resting in the Lord, who He is and who I am in light of who He says I am. I am a chosen, adopted child of God whose sins have been forgiven. I’ve been given new life and a new identity. My worth is not measured by how well I’m meeting expectations or by what I can contribute (a truth I often forget –> I’ve contributed nothing, Jesus contributed everything). In this God has been reminding me to abide in Him, to rest in Him, to find peace in Him. And in this I’m also being reminded that I can’t do everything, but I can be faithful in the areas God has called me to for each season of life.

So what does this season of life look like? It’s a season of finishing well and preparing for change. As I type this we are coming to the end of our first term here in Senegal. We have been away from the States for 3 years. We have made two international moves, had a baby in Africa, started homeschooling, learned (*are learning) a new language (we’ve discovered this is a process), made so many connections with Senegalese people as well as our expat community here, discovered how long and slow cultural acquisition is, grown lots in our marriage and parenting, learned more about who God is by seeing Him through the lens of other cultures and also seen our faith get deepened tremendously through trials and triumphs, homesickness and creating a home, high highs and low lows. We’ve barely scratched the surface on what it means to do ministry and life cross-culturally and we are so grateful we get to walk this, at times heart wrenching and exhausting while simultaneously beautiful, life.

We are excited for our upcoming time in the States to be close to family, to share about the past three years with those who have invested so much for us to be here, to have our baby, to rest well, to get further equipped for the work ahead, to show our kids the city and state we grew up in and love and so on. We are also already so excited for our return to Senegal at the end of the year! What will our second term hold? Each season in it’s time.

For these final three months before our first home assignment I am seeking the Lord for what He has and am resting in His goodness each day. May I walk faithfully the path He has – all glory be to Christ my King.

– Selina