La Lumière: April 2021

The health situation in France is not going well, with numbers surpassing the second peak and 90% of the beds for respirators occupied. New restrictions are being put in place and the vaccine rollout remains dreadfully slow. The vacation we hoped to take this month was canceled because of a third nation wide lockdown. But we're keeping our eyes lifted up. The empty tomb on Easter declares God's ultimate victory, and neither the cross nor our present situation took him by surprise. There are very encouraging things happening in the ministry here. One is that the digital creations team has an intern working with us for the next four months! Jade is a year away from getting her bachelor's degree, studying video and graphics design for web. It's exciting to see new talent and enthusiasm added to the team. Her first project will be a teaser video for the next inter-campus ministry prayer event. Please pray that these four months will be a blessing to her and us, and that we have plenty of good projects for her to work on. Another exciting development is that May and her team are putting a new and improved version of the donation site online. This one was developed to make it much easier to bring new countries on board, less manual with customizable parameters. Scalability is key since Cru is hoping to set up 30 new countries in the next year. Smooth and easy installation is essential to move that quickly! The next big push for May is creating an implementation plan, which essentially means downloading all of her knowledge into a process that a team of people could follow. Multiplication is necessary in her facet of ministry too.

A few months ago the building attendant asked Silas if he would do conversational English lessons with her. She's originally from Brazil and speaks French very well, but would like to improve her English. Once a week Silas spends an hour talking with her about whatever topic she'd like, and he also earns some pocket money. She used to work as a professional photographer, so they often talk about photography together. A couple weeks ago a man who works across the hall from us asked Silas if he could do English lessons with him too. Evidently the attendant was enthusiastically sharing about her tutor. He's been meeting with Silas twice a week, talking together and reading poems. Silas has found out being bilingual is a skill he can capitalize on. What a neat opportunity! Silas is actively looking for an internship in France this summer. He might be disappointed that interns make much less than English tutors!