Category: General

Today, as I mentioned in my previous post, I started reading through the Bible with my friend who has been a believer for only about 6 months. We’ve read the Bible a lot over the last several years, although most of what we have done previously has been reading through the Gospels as well as the new believer lessons that our team uses with people who have said that they want to believe and follow Jesus. I felt like it was important for him to understand the bigger picture, the larger story that God has been telling from the beginning so he could have a solid Biblical picture of what God has been doing, leading to Jesus, and ultimately now to us.

We read Genesis 1 today, talking about how God created the earth. Here were a few notable parts of the discussion:

• God seemed to have systematically moved through the process of creation, developing each component of the creation of the earth and the heavens in a step-by-step way.
• God created man and woman in his own image. We are loved by God and considered to have great importance to him as carriers of his image and his likeness.
• We were given two commandments directly from the beginning: To be fruitful and multiply and to have dominion – oversight – over the birds, the animals, and the fish of the seas. We have been given a great responsibility for all of these.

This morning, I was able to work through two additional regions for the Phase 2 Training:

• North Africa
• East Africa
• South Asia

As I noted in my last post, the intent is to continue to develop the list of these countries so that we can be praying through them, having some basic information to work from and a basis for which we can pray in addition to the people that we know and have met from these countries here where we are working. It is probably also important to understand that I am primarily including those countries whose people we meet here in Italy on a regular basis. I haven’t necessarily included all of the countries, for example, from East Africa, but if they are a regular part of the population that we connect with, I will include them in these lists.

West Africa for Phase 2 Course

I’ve been working on the Phase 2 Training course, specifically trying to think about how to introduce the complexity of all of the different nationalities, tribes, languages, and backgrounds that we work with here in Catania. My initial plan was to try to work through it by region – for example, West Africa, East Africa, North Africa, etc. The peoples in each of those areas are very different, and see themselves as different, despite living on the same continent.

I think I’ve arrived at the idea of introducing these different nations and people groups through our times of prayer. Our weekly prayer calendar already reflects prayer for specific nations and their top people groups by population, so as people come in to train and work with us, I think they can learn about these different nations and peoples in preparation for our times of prayer and then experientially as they meet them during the day.

I’ve created a template per country that uses various resources for Geography, Culture, and Spiritual background information, and just started to fill it in. It certainly doesn’t feel complete, but for the breadth of people that we are working with, the likelihood that we will ever learn any of these in-depth, especially when we are meeting them in a third culture in Italy, seems low to me. Here is what I created for West Africa to date with more to come in other regions of the world.

Prayer Walk

On Friday, we have been going for a prayer walk, praying specifically for Muslims in our area given that their Friday (Jumu’ah) is similar to our Sunday in that they go to the mosque for congregational prayers and a teaching by the imam.

We know the imams in each of the mosques and have enjoyed spending time with them and sharing with them. During this prayer walk, we met an assistant imam at one of the mosques. We had previously given him some food as part of Covid relief, so as we were outside of the mosque praying today, he saw us and called and greeted us. We spent a few minutes talking and he invited us to come visit the mosque next week, so we’re hoping to take some time together one afternoon next week to visit their prayer time and then sit and visit together, hopefully having an opportunity to share our hope in Christ with them as well.

Abiding in Christ

We have been working to disciple a man that was baptized in this last year. As part of our discussion in the afternoon, we read John 15:1-8 and talked about what it means to “remain” or “abide” in Christ, as some of the translations say. As part of that process of abiding, we discussed three ways that we believe that we can do that:

• Reading the Word of God
• Obeying what Jesus tells us to do
• Praying and hearing from God

There are probably other ways as well, but these were the ones that we identified and discussed. The result of this conversation is that we’ve decided to start meeting for a short time each day, even online as needed, to read God’s Word and pray together. This particular man has no background with the Bible, so I’m looking forward to see him grow as he learns what the Bible says.

I’m generally pretty fascinated by advances in technology. I love seeing how sciences and technology advance to do things and create a world of new opportunities and help people and economies in new ways.

I do also think that there is reason to be concerned. As you think about advances in robotics and Artificial Intelligence, it isn’t a long leap to begin to think about how the world of the movie Terminator could be too far away. Even Elon Musk has spoken strongly of these things in the past.

But sometimes it can just be a little fun as the robotics companies show off some of their most recent advances in their abilities of the robots. Boston Dynamics recently released a video of their robots dancing to the song Do You Love Me. Enjoy!