I can be a critic, discouraging pessimist. I can be mean and rude. I can be a self-centered self preservist – there I said it. Truth is, when we are pushed up against a wall, when we are driven by fear, when bad stuff is going on around us that survival instinct kicks in to the max.

Nigeria can be a troubled place. Jos has experienced its fair share of incidents. Last Sunday when there was a suicide car bomb attack at a major church denomination in town about 3km from our house, was one of those times when for a little while the survival instinct kicked in. It was the first time since getting here that I wondered ‘how bad would it have to get before I get up out of here and take my family to safety in England’. Don’t judge me – maybe I am not a very good missionary for thinking about that, maybe I am not fully prepared to pay the cost with my life to serve God and live for Jesus in Nigeria.

As a youth worker I would talk how our faith is stretched like a rubber band or stretch Armstrong toy. The whole concept of not knowing how strong your faith it until it is stretched, you can pull it and pull it and stretch it, and you will only find out how much it can withstand by doing so. God promises (yes a strong work) that we will face trials of many kinds, but he also promises that he will not let us be tested beyond what we can stand. I sometimes wonder – how much can I stand?

Even in the midst horrible badness that results in people dying, it is possible, if you look hard enough to see god working. This car bomb was set off before it reached its destination. It didn’t really go off. Only half of the bomb exploded. Who knows what damaged would have been done if the whole thing had exploded – it would have probably impacted the building to collapse kill all inside. It seems an odd way to protect people, but if you look hard enough, I take courage that God is at work even in troubled times.

New place, new environment, new job, new colleagues, new house, new school, new friends, new opportunities, all provide a chance to discover more about myself.
Post discovery of my Aspergers, it freed me to allow myself to be different. No longer do I wonder why I think and react differently, but instead the mission is to curb the over reactions, increase the tolerance and generally better cope with the hard situations.
There are certain things I have discovered that are not ‘normal’ (if normal is defined by how other people expect an adult to react and behave) but linked to how my brain is wired as an aspie (person with aspergers). I appear to have an over developed sense of possession – what is mine is mine – hands off.  It turns out I am not very good at sharing.
I like the familiar, I like having my computer, my phone, my place to sit at the table, my chair in the lounge, my bit of shelf in the bedroom, my blanket or even my jumper! I don’t like sharing food on my plate and I don’t like people reading over my shoulder.

What is odd, is that internally (and sometimes externally), I can react at unexpected things and sometimes I don’t even know why a situation or a request is causing me a ‘struggle’. Most of the time I can resolve the struggle in my head and get on with whatever is happening, occasionally I can’t or don’t and vocalise the struggle – not always bad, but not always good either!  The funny things is that I can have a reputation for those vocalisations, yet if people only realised how many times I don’t vocalise the struggle, I think I do really well – but when I vocalise it can be so unusual and out of the norm for people who don’t experience the same struggles that they can be perceived as outbursts; I guess they are -sorry to ALL those who have experienced such an outburst!
I’m not very good at sharing jobs either. I like to know what is mine and what isn’t mine. When we got married we identified very early on that cooking was a job better done by one of us at a time, not really good for both of us at the same time. If I have agreed and I am expecting to do a job, to find someone else has done the job – even if they are trying to help me. I experience that struggle as if something has been stolen from me, a sense of injustice related to my constant struggle for self-preservation – also known as selfishness.

More later on other things I’ve picked up over the past 18 months.

for your viewing pleasure – Tim Driving across a river. I’d LOVE to make up some adventurous story about long lost tribes, but truth is we were heading to a camp site along the river (15 h drive from Jos) for a rather last minute holiday just before Christmas 2011.

Driving across the river was a LOT OF FUN!

It has been a long time in the pipeline, but here is our latest newsletter

Feb 2012 newsletter

ALI – When we headed out here to Nigeria, we though i would get involved teaching at Hillcrest school.  It turns out they don’t’ have need for a high school science teacher.   So we took some time out and explored a few options in the Wycliffe office.

I have a title which is currently ‘data archivist’ and my current project is to gather and assimilate information on Nigerian languages (all 520+ of them!) in order to provide an update for the Ethnologue (if you don’t know what this is, which you  check out www.ethnologue.org).
This is quite a mammoth undertaking as there are 3 pages of questions for each of the languages. For many of the language groups we have little or no information and no easy way of getting it. It is quite a shock coming from a culture where I am used to any information I require (and an awful lot that I don’t!) being available to me following a few clicks of a mouse. It has made me realise that the web isn’t actually as “world wide” as you might think, at least in its content.

I have also had the opportunity of dusting off my rather cobwebby database skills as we try to create a database that can enable us to keep track of what information we do have and show us the gaps of what we need to find out.

I have been working closely with one of our directors, as most of the work that I am taking on used to be done by him. However he and his wife have had to return to the US for a few months so we are now having to work by e-mail rather than face to face. Thankfully we are both quite happy working with this medium but please pray for continued clear communication.

Well, the dust has finally settled after Christmas, actually quite literally as our house help was away for the best part of 2 weeks!   For me it seemed quite uneventful, yet fun/  It was odd hearing songs about dreaming of white Christmas blaring out from stores in town.  That particular song always reminds of hanging out in Devon during the summer, a certain collection of friends (you know who you are Dave!) would sing it at full volume for basically no reason that I can remember, except maybe that it was in fact the middle of summer.  I am discovering that a lot of Nigerians long for things that are from America or Europe.  They often think that the US and Europe are better places and they think, behave and have the things they do, then life will be better.  So you find churches that have adopted our way of singing, you find people who love to watch 24 – let alone every village displaying the latest English premiership scores.

Christmas seemed a bit more low key.  There are hundreds of £ spend on decorating the streets.  I didn’t feel as if my toes were going to drop of as I shopped.  People here in the city often head out to the village to be with their extended families, have a nice lunch, not too dissimilar to us at home.  (we even managed to see the queen on youtube a few hours after her broadcast).  There isn’t I don’t think the same level of materialism surrounding Christmas as there is at home.  We certainly didn’t’ have a stack of gifts under the tree, we were very blessed to come home to a wee parcel on our door step one evening and we our selves and almost filled a small stocking for each other.  We gave Dan a new bible his first full text – he loves it, he feels like nothing is missing from the stories now!  He also had fun building a Lego helicopter set that had made it through the post (again you know who you are Dave!).

We made it to a Christmas eve service held on the school basketball courts, it was slightly odd needing sunglasses on Christmas eve.  But then the bomb threats started , and at 1100 peace was broken then a church was attacked in the city.  There is a write on on BBC, but it was an unusual thing to be concerned about.  The day we celebrate Jesus, the prince of PEACE coming to earth, there was a lot of security and tension around the city.   We headed up a block to be with some friends fro lunch, it was strange not to have turkey or roast potatoes or cheese and biscuits (oo i miss stilton!), or in fact no Christmas pudding.  It wasn’t’ strange with with our friends who also just arrived in Nigeria a few months ago, it was totally okay for us to talk about home, and what we missed and the people we would normally be with and family traditions and various things.  It felt very natural normal, dare I use the word -nice.  They are friends that we have got to know well and are comfortable around, sharing the struggles of settling into a new place and doing things for the first time, we really appreciated them having us over and allowing us to be family.

Fortunately there was no other trouble in town over the holiday period, but we are now 2 days into a national strike focused on the price of petrol that has gone from 65n to 140n over night last week.  Os far so good, still calm around town.

I’m in abuja helping out with the Hillcrest choir tour (We live opposite the choir leader Mrs Rasche – besides it is my youth work fix for a while!) The kids just did a great job singing glory to God.

The pastor preached in church this morning about the women at the well, under the title “the man I met”.

I was struck by these verses.
John 4:10-11
10 Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.”
11 “But sir, you don’t have a rope or a bucket,” she said, “and this well is very deep. Where would you get this living water?

the well is very deep – metaphorically she is correct abut the well of our Lord and saviour, but I have learnt far more about wells since living in Nigeria. This well where the woman was sat is famous because ti never ran out, it never ran our because it was so deep that even if the water tael dropped, you could still get water. But deep wells come at a price. They are hard to dig. The cost a lot to create. They require more effort to get the the out – there was not pump at this well! She was joking Jesus because she knew all these things (as did Jesus right!). and at that point where she thought she had the upper hand, Jesus made his move and challenged her in a way that no one else could. I understand more now about how central to life wells are. I have witnessed them as that central meeting point. We have had our share of water supply problems – who eve drinks this water will thirst again – SOOO true. We are in dry season, and there is talk that our well will dry up because there wasn’t enough rain this year.

God’s living water will never run out. Even though I am a missionary in Nigeria, I do wonder how well am I doing at trusting God to supply all our needs. Some may look at us in wonder the fact we left up the Uk, Ali left her job, moved away from everything we knew, but still I wonder – do I trust God for that living water every day? Does the well run dry in my life, because I am trying to get from the wrong well?

The choice the woman feed wasn’t about water or no water. Her well had never run dry in the history of the well. The choice was really between temporary and eternal.

The person offering you something can indicate the quality of the offer. When Jesus makes us an offer it is a guarantee based on who he is. The Supply is continuous – unlike our power, and sometimes our water! His promise, his power to supply is unending, unchangeable, unbreakable, untappable, incorruptible and perfect for our needs.

So today 11-11-11 is wycliffe’s annual day of prayer, all the people working all over the world, in one way or another will take some time out to pray for our ministry. I am responsible for the prayer morning here in Nigeria, (part of my special projects for the director job) and so I want to invite you to be part of it! These are the things were going to be praying for Nigeria as a country – put together by one of the Nigerian chaps in our office.

PRAYER FOR THE COUNTRY NIGERIA

PRAISES

1. Unity in diversity

2. Emergence of new strategies to tackling peace challenges

3. Church growth

4. There is hope for the country Nigeria

REQUEST

1. Peace, Unity and Progress to truly take roots in the hearts of Nigerians.

2. Corruption to reduce drastically to the minimum level in a mysterious way.

3. That the LORD will transform our Leaders or give us new leaders who are selfless in there service to the nation.

4. That the Nigerian church will truly be light in the world and not be influenced negatively by the world.

5. That the Nigerian church and communities catch the vision of Bible Translation and also take ownership of it.

6. That the Nigerian church will be more committed to Evangelizing and Discipleship of Children and Youths.

7. Pray that the church and Ministries will catch the vision and practice Integral Missions

I have the chance to go play a couple songs, as a ‘ministration’ at a church last Sunday morning.  I managed to coble together a video and eventually get it up on youtube.  It honestly sounded far better than this video does!  Someone said there was 1000 people there, it was a ‘prophetic power praise morning’ – lots of load praise so much prophecy – maybe I had wrong expectations.    I’ve also been asked if i can go and help work on their PA – maybe run a workshop for them, which would be cool because the band were INCREDIBLE the pa not so much.

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2 weeks ago we started our Hausa course. Hausa is one of the major languages in Nigeria (out of 520) and it is the one spoken in the north where we are. I am not a big fan of language learning but I am getting on with it okay for now. There are 5 of us in the class, none of whom are linguists, none of whom are thriving in the environment, but we are doing it to honour our Nigerian hosts and enable us to greet properly – it is very important here.

The first thing we learnt is about greetings. There is none of this hi bye business, but there is a long series of greetings. The bold is a loose translation, don’t over analyse it – it doesn’t work believe me!

T: sannu. hi
A: yauwa sannu. hi to you too!
T: yaya gida. how is your household
A: lafia. fine
T: yaya maigida how is your husband
A: lafia lau. very fine
T: yaya aiki. how is your work
A: mun gode Allah. we thank God
T: yaya giyada. how is your tiredness
A: ba giyada. there is no tiredness

Etc etc. and so it goes on

T: Sai an jima. see you tomorrow
A: to yauwa sai an jima. yup see ya

It doesn’t matter how anybody is or if you are tired or if work is bad, you always answer in the positive. It occurred to me that we Brits often do the same thing.

T:Hi! How are you
A: Fine thanks and you?
T:Fine
A: Great cya.

Sometimes I get sick of the falseness.
Sometimes I’m glad to hide behind it.
Maybe we aren’t so different from the Nigerians.