The Shumaker Family’s Blog

My wife told the children the story of Thanksgiving.  Later in the day, Meredith asked a couple of times, “Are the Indians coming to eat lunch with us today?”

I wanted to write and wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving.  We count it a great blessing to have friends and family like you.

We did celebrate Thanksgiving with a meal, but I suppose the rest of the day wasn’t a usual Thanksgiving day.

I taught for a few hours this morning at the Bible College.

Then we had our lunch.  Rebecca cooked chicken instead of turkey.  Turkey is more than double the price. So here we eat chicken and pretend that it gobbles.  We had 6 Africans with us.  What  a blessing to be able to share our Thanksgiving with them.  We are away from our family, but God has allowed us to create a new family here.  We all shared what we were thankful for.  All of them were thankful that they were saved and that God has allowed us to work together.

We had a kids club about 5 miles from the house.  We had about 45 kids and to my surprise, four mothers came also.  We were wanting to start a church there in the near future, but we might have to start even sooner than we had thought.

Tonight, we continued our missions conference.  Last night was great.  Tonight was also wonderful.  Last year, our church gave $650 to missions.  That might not sound like a lot to you but for people that make about $1 a day, that is amazing.  God is really using the messages and I believe that the best is yet to come.

Last night for youth meeting, we had a young man by the name of Konate preach.  He did a wonderful job.  This morning another young man by the name of Talibala preached at Tingandogo.  He did a great job.  Tonight, I let three other young men preach(Simon, Salif, and Mamadou).  They all did great.  I am thrilled with the progress of these young men.  I have no idea what God has in store for them in the future, but they are each doing wonderfully.  I feel that it is impossilbe to explain the joy that is in your heart, when a young man that you have had the priveldge to train, preaches a wonderful message.  A slam dunk doesn’t even come close.

We had a missions conference in our church at Tingandogo last week.  This is the first church that we started here in Burkina Faso.  We have never had a missions conference here.  God has moved in marvelous ways.  I preached on Thursday and Friday night.  Saturday night we had an Ivorian pastor preach.  His name is Pastor Ake.  He is a tremendous blessing.  His church in the Ivory Coast fully supports him.  They also send over $250 a month in missions.  This is extremely odd in West Africa.  In Ivory Coast, I know of about 30 churches and only about 5 support missions.

Saturday night was one of the most moving services that I have ever been in here in Africa.  God really moved.  Our faith promise will be about $25 a month.  That is great considering the size of the church and also their finances.  We will be starting a Missions Conference at Water of life Baptist Church next week.  We hope to increase what we are giving.

The national missionary that we support in Mali(Francis) has had  some very interesting things happen to him.  One young lady about 16 years of age, accepted Christ.  She comes from a very dedicated Muslim family.  When she made this decision, her father became enraged.  He was wanting to kill her.  Francis hid this young lady in his home.  He talked with the authorities and they agreed that he should keep her and that they would back him up, if needed.  Please pray for this young lady.  I am not sure of her name but God knows.

I am a little late in writing a new blog.  I should probably say, a lot late.  A week and a half ago, I let Salif preach at Tingandogo on Sunday morning.  If only you could have known Salif in 2002, when I first met him.  He didn’t speak much French, didn’t know how to read and was a very closed Muslim.  To see where God has brought him is an absolute miracle.  God is still in the life changing business.  He probably preached one of the best messages that any of my young men have ever preached.  He did a superb job.  I was shocked, to be honest.

At our church at Cissin, Water of life Baptist Church, we had a baptism.  I had the great privilege of baptizing 5 people.  We baptized a former Muslim lady.  Her husband is Muslim but doesn’t have a problem with her coming to our church.  That is very strange.  That is very abnormal here.  We haven’t had anybody physically hurt by accepting Christ as their Saviour but we have had many attacked verbally and unfortunaltely to the point where some have given in.  We had no salvation decisions but we did have about 7 visitors and I am sure there were some that were lost.