Morley Update 2010 #12

Everyone,

After a week of cloudy and pretty cool days I awoke to a blue sky and sunshine today - I had my clothes in the washer by 7:30am and they should dry on the line quickly.

Since I had a good response to my "snapshots" last week, I just want to share a couple of incidents from this week.

On Friday night Kent and I were invited to spend the evening at his friend "H"s house. "H" is a former English student who didn't learn much English but became a Christian. He is a great guy but when we have had him here without an interpreter it is very hard to have a conversation. He told us his sister would also be there who speaks no English and his brother-in-law who also speak VERY little English. I was dreading the evening just feeling it would be awkward and we would end up starring at each other with no way to communicate. God had other plans though. When "H" met us at the metro station, we all got on the bus for the 1/2 hour ride to his house. On the way he made a comment in Greek. I said "xeries ellinika" (do you know Greek) He said "Nai" - yes. I began to ask questions in my halting Greek and amazingly I could understand the answers! When we got to his house we found that his brother-in-law also spoke Greek and we had a wonderful evening filled with laughter and conversation which was a mixture of English, Greek, Farsi and the two Kurdish words Kent knew. I am now looking forward to having them all to our home.

On Saturday Kent and I spent 4-6 hours working on our Greek homework and we both said we were feeling burnt out. We had invited a couple of refugee friends to go to church with us the next day and then come home for dinner. Once again I was not really looking forward to it. I was tired and not feeling like cooking, Kent was beginning to get a cold, and I was really wishing we had nothing on the schedule for the next day. Once again God was at work. The next morning we picked up Dr. "S" our friend from Pakistan who is a new Christian and Mohamed the Tailor who is a Kurdish Christian that we knew from when we were here before. He has been in the Netherlands for over a year and had made a life for himself there but was picked up for no papers and shipped back here where he has nothing. Dr. "S" had never been to church before so asked us to explain what would happen there. We explained the order of the service and since we go to a church that has communion every Sunday we explained about how it symbolized what Jesus did for us on the cross and was a time to pray and remember that. As I sat next to Dr. "S" that day I felt tears welling up as I shared communion for the first time with this new believer. After church Dr. "S" said, "I have no words to tell you what I am feeling. When I went to the Mosque the Imam always was holding himself up as higher than everyone else. Here everyone is alike. At the Mosque the Imam would not allow anyone else to speak. Here many people spoke and prayed. At the Mosque the Imam would be speaking of God who is terrible and angry and wants to punish us. Here you talked of God who loves us. At the Mosque no women would enter. Here there are women and men and children worshiping together. I liked this very much". When we got home Youssef was here also and we all sat down to dinner together. Once again it was an afternoon filled with food, conversation and laughter.

I am so thankful that God takes me where I am at, even when I don't have the best attitude, and still blesses my efforts to be obedient. I was happy yesterday to be able to use my Greek again with a lady from Poland who spoke no English. I was able to find out where she is from, that she has a son, she is living in a church etc. It is very satisfying to see our hard work studying beginning to pay off.

Lastly, I wanted to address a question I have received from several people. There has been a lot on the news about the economic crisis in Greece accompanied by civil unrest. People have asked how that is affecting us. The economic crisis was in part brought on by the HUGE bureaucracy that Greece has. The new government is taking a tough stance on making cuts especially to perks for public employees. They have also raised taxes on several items most notably gas and cigarettes. I had to laugh because I was reading in the Athens News, which is an English newspaper in Greece, an article on the fact that the average person's income would decrease and the cost of living increase. They charted two different hypothetical families comparing their fixed expenses to see the difference between this year and last year. These expenses included, housing, car costs, telecom costs and of course on both of them one of the larger fixed expenses was cigarettes! Only in Greece! Anyway, all this combined has made a lot of people unhappy and Greeks are big on protests. There have always been random strikes and protests throughout the year but now because the government will not give in they are getting more frequent. This is mostly just an inconvenience to us because many of the strikes are transportation strikes. For 24 hours there will be no buses, no metro and often no taxis. That means our team cannot get down to the ARC to do ministry. Last week we had to cancel our Thursday meal because of a strike. It looks like this might continue and we are looking at how to deal with it. Please pray with us about a good solution. There has also been some minor rioting in the form of vandalism but nothing on the scale of the riots last year.

Please continue to pray for our team as we still seem to be battling a lot of illness. Also please hold up our many refugee friends who are in need of work. Kent and I are pressing on in our Greek studies and appreciate prayers for that as well. Thank you so much for all you do to love us and support us - we could not do this without you.

Serving Him Together,
Kent and Myrna Morley
Tripoleos 76
Elliniko 16777
Athens Greece
011 30 210 96 38 625
backhoeboy1@juno.com
http://kent-uniquelymorley.blogspot.com

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