Most of you are aware that Tracy and I lived in West Africa for a year. During my time there I became deathly ill from Malaria. In fact, at one point the doctor told me I was “about 3 hours away from death”. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

Beyond what Malaria meant to me personally, it is still devastating people around the world, particularly in Africa where 59% of the world’s cases are reported. I watched so many of our friends experience great pain and even death due to the existence of Malaria.

Today is designated as World Malaria Day. I would encourage to read this information sheet in order to be more aware of what Malaria is doing around the world.

For those who haven’t read the comment thread from my last post, Tracy’s grandfather passed away early Wednesday morning. Please continue to pray for our family. It’s hard for me to really explain how important he was to us. It’s also hard to explain how important he was to me personally. Sorting through this loss has been, and will continue to be, very difficult.

Please pray specifically for his wife Mary Jane as she learns to live alone for the first time in her life. Please also pray for Tracy as she is really struggling with this loss. Finally, if you will, please pray for me. I will officiate at his funeral tomorrow and I am worried that I will not be able to make it through the service. It will be the most difficult funeral I’ve ever led.

To read his obituary, click here.

Tracy is leading a prayer group this Saturday for our local Baptist Association and she is tasked with leading the prayer for West Africa. She is very excited about the opportunity. I was helping her do a little research tonight and was on the West Africa region website, which is incredibly full of amazing information. While researching, however, I ran across a page filled with music from West Africa. We almost jumped out of our skin when we saw a couple of songs from the Dagaara people.

This is a big deal for us because the Dagaara recordings were done in one of our villages while Tracy and I were serving among the Dagaara. We worked, together with a couple from Senegal who were music missionaries, to lead our people to write this original music and then we helped record this music. Tracy and I were sitting with our Dagaara friends while these recordings were being made. We had never had the chance to hear this music so to listen to it tonight was an unexpected treat. It was also a walk down memory lane for us.

I’ve posted a song below so that you can get a taste of Dagaara music. I hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

[audio:http://gowestafrica.org/media/music/13-west-africa-music-dagaara-of-bu.mp3]

I continue to do research for my current sermon series, The Bible & The Bush, and as I do I come across amazing content that I really love to share. The video below is actually a combination of interviews and pictures some of my sister’s former co-workers from when she worked with the IMB and their “One Story” partnership. She lived in Niger, rather than Mali which is highlighted a great deal in the video, but the images portray a village very similar to the one she lived in, as well as the one that Tracy and I lived in while in Burkina Faso. The video is wonderful at revealing life in the West African bush. The references to malaria and “toe” still bring back bad, bad memories for me. I hope the video is enlightening and encouraging to you.

The following article is based on a sermon by missionary Del Tarr who served fourteen years in West Africa with a mission agency. His story points out the price some people pay to sow the seed of the gospel in hard soil. This story caused me to stop and consider my own commitment to commuicating the gospel. I hope it challenges you.

I was always perplexed by Psalm 126 until I went to the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more than four thousand miles wide just under the Sahara Desert. In the Sahel, all the moisture comes in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. The year’s food, of course, must all be grown in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small fields.   October and November…these are beautiful months. The granaries are full — the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday’s Cream of Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep.

December comes, and the granaries start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal. Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day. By February, the evening meal diminishes. The meal shrinks even more during March and children succumb to sickness. You don’t stay well on half a meal a day. April is the month that haunts my memory. In it you hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of gruel.Then, inevitably, it happens. A six- or seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. “Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got grain!” he shouts.

“Son, you know we haven’t had grain for weeks.”

“Yes, we have!” the boy insists. “Out in the hut where we keep the goats — there’s a leather sack hanging up on the wall — I reached up and put my hand down in there — Daddy, there’s grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!”

The father stands motionless. “Son, we can’t do that,” he softly explains. “That’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and starvation. We’re waiting for the rains, and then we must use it.”

The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt! Why? Because he believes in the harvest.The seed is his; he owns it. He can do anything with it he wants. The act of sowing it hurts so much that he cries. But as the African pastors say when they preach on Psalm 126, “Brother and sisters, this is God’s law of the harvest. Don’t expect to rejoice later on unless you have been willing to sow in tears.”

And I want to ask you: How much would it cost you to sow in tears? I don’t mean just giving God something from your abundance, but finding a way to say, “I believe in the harvest, and therefore I will give what makes no sense. The world would call me unreasonable to do this — but I must sow regardless, in order that I may someday celebrate with songs of joy.”   

Those of you who have read this blog much know that I love West Africa. Our time spent their working with the Dagaara people was the single most defining event of our ministry. We believe that God has called us to serve the local church and help equip others to serve overseas as missionaries and that keeps us focused on our work here in the states. We still, however, retain a significant amount of love and respect for the missionaries on the field.

The West Africa region has put together and incredible website that delivers a tremendous amount of information to help pray for and volunteer to work among, West African people. I particularly love the new feature that highlights videos of West African missions.

I want to post one of those videos below. This is a thank you offered by David who is an IMB missionary in the country we used to live in, Burkina Faso. He has been working faithfully as a missionary in West Africa for many years. This video, and the others, are wonderful reminders of how the sacrificial giving of Southern Baptists continues to impact the Kingdom in tremendous ways.

I’ve got a couple of videos to throw out there, in case you might be interested. The best one is a video posted on my wife’s blog. That’s right, she’s now a blogger! I’m very excited about this turn of events. We’ve struggled with what to do with our family site for a while and she’s decided to use it to post videos and pictures for our family in particular to see. She posted her first video tonight. It’s a hilarious video of our youngest daughter Kessed singing and then trying to avoid the camera. You need to check it out. You can see it here.

The second video is a recent message from Frederick Boulevard. We’re still trying to work out the glitches with posting videos on our new website. For some reason we cannot get this video formatted to show on that site. So I’m posting it here if you are interested. It’s not the highest quality yet, we’re working on that too, but it’s here if you are interested. This message has been one of the more popular ones that I’ve delivered at Frederick. The monkey story at the beginning seems to have been a big hit with a lot of folks.

Click To Play

…here come the Gators.