Sitting in our tent starting another week of mission simulation, we are now into our fourth week and my wife seems to be speaking in tongues a lot J well Russian.

We are living in large Army tents so they are quite spacious. We have a kitchen, a small living room, and a very small bedroom, so it does have some comfort plus the Lord has given us some good weather although we are experiencing some strong winds at the minute which can make you think the tents will fly away!  Thankfully they are firmly anchored with some pretty solid stakes. This makes me think about something I shared today from Psalm 1. Maybe you know the chapter - it speaks of a tree with its roots firmly planted by a river. The river will sustain the tree and make it strong. We too need to have our roots in the living waters of God and His Word so we can be strengthened for the life He has for us to live.

I (Geoff) am still working on the grounds so I just live in the tent whereas Dar Gail is learning Russian in the mornings and working in the office in the afternoon.  So we are both pretty tired by the end of the day.  One of the reasons being that we have to carry all our water for washing, drinking and cooking, then walk back with all the waste water to a specific location, which may not sound like much but it gets boring quickly J.

We don’t have internet access out here so communication is limited to one day a week and a supply run for fresh food once a week. Why, you may ask, do we have to do all this?  Well, as we are living in England it is quite hard to simulate life in the jungle, and as most of you know this world has become very small with the use of the internet even reaching many jungle tribes!  But the idea of Mission Sim is to try in some small way to make life a bit harder to simulate life in a tribal situation.  Another side is the language learning. Again this is just simulating what it is like on the field, putting into practice what we have learnt over the past year about language learning for an unwritten language.  (When I say we, I mean the rest of the class and Dar Gail - I don’t have to do the language stuff again, for which I am very grateful!)

Our cottage is a massive praise. For a long time it has sat with no work done but over the past month or so we have had a lot of work done on it thanks to a lot of people including some of the Friends in Action Team from NI!  We have gotten all the plastering completed, the first coat of paint on all the walls the kitchen floor tiled, interior doors replaced, Cronus in place and sills ready to be put in. By the time we leave mission sim we hope to have most of the wood work done and ready to paint. The kitchen still is needing fitted and the bath room and plumbing still to do.  But I want to thank God for getting it as far as it is now!

Thank you all for your continued prayers and support over our time here. For our American friends we will be visiting the U.S. for the month of December so if you would like to hear more about our work here please let us know, we would love to share with you Gods work with NTM and with us.