Happy 2024 to all of you! As we face a New Year, we are ever aware of our incredible team of supporters who continue to encourage us and enable us to do the work God has called us to do. Generally, our new year's post involves looking back at the high points of life and ministry for the past year. We are excited to share those but also don't want to hide the fact that we have most definitely faced difficulties and challenges as well. We greatly appreciate your on going prayers in thanking the Lord with us for what He has done and will continue to do. While the challenges have sometimes felt overwhelming, we try not to dwell there too much. That's honestly how we have learned to do life. Celebrate the wins, and not dwell too much on the challenges or failures. At times these challenges or difficulties aren't so easy to look past or move on from. This phenomena of only showing the positive has been accentuated with social media, in that mostly the good things or best photos are portrayed leaving a skewed version of our own or others lives. Honestly it's made the publication of this news letter more challenging than in the past, because we want to be real. 2023 had some high points, but it also brought with it difficult things as well. Unfortunately, we can't share many of these in this format due to the sensitive nature- how it relates to colleagues, security risks, governments and systems, and the privacy of our patients and local friends. What God has been teaching us from these challenges and difficulties is how to lament. This year, the Psalms have been especially helpful, but in a different way from in the past. We've been noticing how many times David was looking at the difficulty of life and his circumstances and crying out to God. Let's just say, we don't have it all figured out yet. However, we are learning from these feelings and circumstances, and have found a few helpful resources such as a book named Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament by Mark Vroegop and Liturgies and Laments for the Sojourner by Alicia Boyce, Heather Falls and Tamika Rybinski. We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you face to face to share our life and ministry in more detail.
For those of you who we have not yet had a chance to chat or cross paths with, we returned to the USA the end of October. We have enjoyed the opportunity to rest and spend the holidays with family. Our last Thanksgiving with the Nattier side of the family was in 2015 due to Josiah's birth in 2020 which had us in the hospital over the holiday. We have also enjoyed some cooler weather and celebrating Christmas with Natasha's family.
We are thankful for two new families that joined us in Togo this year, the Fergusons and Mupepes. They have been a great encouragement to us and helped make our break possible. Despite the challenges, we have certainly seen God continuing to provide for us and the ministry in Togo in many ways.
This past year, God has given us multiple opportunities to have meaningful and encouraging conversations with some of our Togolese friends. As we share Biblical stories and and converse about who Christ is and what He has done for us, we rejoice in new understanding and evidence that God actively at work in the hearts of those we've come to know and love and also in our hearts as well.
We praise God for opportunities to pour into several children that are near and dear to our family. Elliahna has been involved in a Bible study for young girls in our community and also had the blessing of tutoring a local friend in science and in math. It has been sweet watching their friendship grow and seeing how God is very much using our children in ministry as well. We also rejoice in the fruit we have seen as Gospel truths take hold in a child who is often in our home and playing with our children.
Also for those who have been following Nafi's story, please continue to pray for her and her family. She is doing well physically. Her healing and outcome are remarkable. We also continue to pray for spiritual healing. In addition, life and travel has become more difficult for her and others from her town due to increased terrorist activity. Please pray for the country of Burkina Faso and the citizens who are suffering due to the continued instability. Thank you to those of you who helped make her trip to Kenya possible. In addition, we have two more patients with similar problems who need the same intervention. One of them is young man from our city, Mango. The other is young female who has a much more extreme tumor and is from Togo but a bit to our south. We hope to have more information on potential feasibility and timing for surgery after our returning in March.
Since stateside, we have been able to connect with a local church here in Greenville, named Fellowship Greenville. We have been attending here when we are in Greenville since 2020. The past two months we were able to meet more of their staff and share in several ways what God is doing in Togo. We are grateful for the increasing opportunities this has given us to connect and have community even in our short stents here in South Carolina and we are excited for this new partnership.
This month we will be heading north on a whirlwind trip to visit several churches and friends in OH, IN and IL. Here are some upcoming dates in case you are in one of these areas, we would love to connect.
January 21-23 - UBC Beavercreek
January 24th Englewood Grace
January 28th AM - Nine Mile, PM Salem Baptist
When we return to SC, Natasha and I are going to get away for a break and to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. Then we head back to Togo the beginning of March.
Back in Togo the team welcomed our next two residents. We are excited to meet them in person on our return. This year our teams selected another resident from Cameroon, Arung.
We selected our first female resident from Rawanda, named Patiente.
Please be praying for each of them as well as Sweni and Yannick for continued growth in surgical knowledge and in the Lord. In addition, our PAACS program has now expanded to two sites. Our sister hospital in southern Togo started with two residents on January 1st. The two sites will give our residents a chance to learn from a greater number of faculty and varying hospital experiences. Our two hospitals are under the same mission and in the same country but have a lot of differences in our types of pathology, people groups, and patient backgrounds partly due to geographic and cultural differences. Please also be praying for our sister hospital HBB as they are undergoing a lot of changes this next year.
Prayer Requests:
Our Family: Please pray for our remaining time stateside and good opportunities to share all that God is doing in Togo. Also pray for the time to be restful and refreshing as we are away from some of the stresses that go along with life and ministry there. Also pray for our return in March, especially for wisdom as we reengage in ministry. Each time we return is a reset of rhythms and ministry. We pray that God would show us how, where, and with whom to invest our time. We never know how much time we have left to serve there, and we seek to use the time and talents wisely.
Our Team: Please pray for continued water shortages. This affects all of our expat and national team members, as it makes life and work more challenging. Please pray for fruit and harvest in the ministry. We see that God is at work, but there are impediments to our friends to follow Jesus.
Our PAACS Team: With the expansion of PAACS to HBB, our surgical departments at the two hospitals in Togo will be working even more closely. There is a significant physical separation between our two sites, but we pray that this collaboration will be successful in spite of these and other challenges. Please pray for the surgical faculty and residents at both sites. Training, both medical and spiritual, takes work and intentionality. We pray that these efforts would be profitable for our faculty and residents and that God would be at work and ultimately glorified through this work and in our lives.
