February, 2004

We are overwhelmed by your prayers and words of support and encouragement. We have received several hundred personal emails from you this past weekend, from all over the world. Many of you have forwarded our request for prayer to your own prayer networks. We have heard from friends in Australia, Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and the United States. Email is such a wonderful prayer tool. We had friends who published our letter on their prayer networks who in turn had members publish it on other networks. You prayed for us in worship services at Northland and in other churches in Florida and Ohio (that we know of).

So when we woke up this morning we were at total peace with our situation, and expectantly looking forward to what God would do. I knew that you all were still praying fervently for us. Last night Manus drove 200 miles across the desert to be with us today. Sylvia drove 60 miles from Rehoboth. George stayed home from work to be with us. So supported by your prayers and my close, close friends I called the man in Immigration who held our passports and our immediate future in his hands. His name is Kosmos. I made an appointment to talk to him about our situation. We left Val at home, so in case they arrested or detained me, she would still be free to call the embassy, the Marines and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And of course, all of you.

The first thing Kosmos did when I arrived in his office was hand me a gospel tract and say, "this is a gift for you." Government officials can do that in Namibia. I was only tempted for a second to ask him if he would help me become a Christian. I mean, could he possibly arrest or deport someone he had just led to Christ? But I resisted the temptation. Before I had a chance to thank God for placing me in the hands of a Christian immigration agent, Kosmos turned me over to another agent and left. Mr. Kapolo, however, turned out to be equally as nice and very helpful.

Having tried many times to describe our complicated story of approval and denial, I realized how hard it was for an official to understand all of those details verbally. So I had prepared a short summary of what had transpired since we arrived in Namibia a little over a year ago. I was also a little afraid that if I told the story orally, I would again fall back on my powers of persuasion rather than rest in God's arms. So rather than try and convince him orally, I just handed him the short historical description of the facts from our perspective and asked him to read it. He read it thoroughly, asked a few questions and excused himself. 15 minutes later he returned and gave me our passports back, said there were no problems, but that we would have to submit new applications for work permits. To do so, we would need to leave the country while they were being processed. He gave us as much time as we need to prepare to leave. That in itself was a miracle. Three days is the maximum length of time they normally give someone with a passport problem.

He did not stamp an order to leave the country in our passports. We will call him once we are ready and he will notify the border control agents to let us leave the country without detaining us. This is a true blessing since a close friend of ours was arrested at the border this past weekend because of a passport problem. The fact that he did not stamp our passports with an order to leave the country is an added blessing. That stamp would have caused us a problem and lengthy explanations whenever we would cross the border in the future.

Upon departure, we will submit our new applications. We will stay in South Africa while we await a decision concerning our new applications. For reasons too numerous to mention in this brief praise report, we are confident that our new applications will be approved in due time. If the time extends from weeks to months, we will return to the States and await the decision in both Florida and Colorado.

After cordially answering all my questions, he returned our passports and wished us a pleasant day. Manus, Sylvia and I left the building quickly without our feet ever touching the ground. George was anxiously awaiting us at the entrance and we celebrated on the sidewalk with a prayer of thanksgiving. God is so good.

What have we learned in the past few weeks about God and faith? We exhausted all known ways to try and impact a positive resolution to our problem. We had used every contact we could find (literally dozens of people tried to help us) and at the end, we were powerless to effect an approval or even to discover our true status. We finally turned the whole situation over to God in our helplessness and He acted powerfully on our behalf. We are, of course are now wondering why we delayed so long. As one close German friend told me recently, you have placed yourselves totally in the hands of God and now you are completely out of the hands of the officials. That wisdom proved very true today.

One more interesting observation about how God has worked in our lives. It is virtually impossible to actually have a face-to-face conversation with someone inside the Home Affairs bureaucracy. They don't answer their phones, they don't return calls and you can't get past the front door unless they leave word at the guard station that they are expecting you. Even then it is difficult because they don't answer their phones for the guard to announce you either and so the guard tells you that, even though you are expected, they are not available. The only way to contact them is to know someone who knows their private cell phone number. However, once they confiscated our passports, they suddenly wanted to talk to us. So what I had been trying to accomplish for months became a reality in a matter of minutes this morning. At times the road to God's safety must first pass through the gauntlet of danger. It's a trust thing; God seems committed to it