Kay returned from teaching how to use mobile phones in Ghana and Kenya (click here to read the story). But is mobile a viable platform for discipleship and training?

Here is some good reading on mobile devices. I’ve put some of my favorite quotes beneath each article link.

1. Tablets are starting to impact African education

Africa is the second-largest mobile-phone market in the world behind Asia … Over the past 10 years, the number of mobile connections in Africa grew an average of 30 percent a year, and the report predicted it would reach 735 million people by the end of this year on a continent with about a billion people. [Note: this would be about 70% of the population.]

USAID recently started an education mobile-phone initiative and last year hosted, in Bethesda, Md., the first International Symposium on Mobiles for Education for Development. The initiative aims to improve access to low-cost mobile technologies for education globally.

It’s important not to oversell the use of mobile technology in Afr...

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“My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work”, Jesus told them. “Don’t you say, ‘There are still four more months, then comes the harvest?’  Listen to what I’m telling you: Open your eyes and look at the fields, for they are ready for harvest.”  ~ John 4:34-35

I appreciate these thoughts from my friend, Janey:

How long does a harvest last? It’s not very long. Usually, when the fruit is ripe, a farmer has to hurry to get the product out of the fields before it starts falling to the ground to rot. There is urgency to a harvest time because there is a definite time when the opportunity to harvest will be lost. Because of this, the farmer suspends all activities and does little else until the harvest is collected. He spends hours on the field, only stopping for brief periods to eat and sleep. When the harvest is too great for one man to bring it all in he calls other farmers to help with his harvest. His focus is on the harvest and will do whatever is necessary to rea...

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“We have drifted away from being fishers of men to being keepers of the aquarium.”
~ attributed to Paul Harvey

NOTE: We took this photo at Sea World last summer.

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God just doesn’t fit into any box. We often appear to try to box God in by predetermining how he should work out a solution to my current problem.

I’m reading through Acts. It’s amazing how often God spoke directly with Paul, to warn him, to guide him, to encourage him.

So, why then did God use the son of Paul’s sister to overhear an ambush plot? Why did Paul believe him? (Acts 23:16-18)

It would have been easy for Paul to say, “Thanks, nephew. But I have this communication channel with God, you see. He speaks directly to me. In fact, he spoke to me just last night and said, “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome.” He didn’t say anything about this ambush plot, so we’ll just let things go. I’m sure God can deal with it.”

No. Paul understood that God uses all sorts of ways to communicate with us. Paul understood a very important principle. Don’t put God in a box. Don’t predetermine how God will speak or how God will act.

Let God be God.

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“Disastrophe” is a family word coined by one of our sons when he was about four. (Being hit by three large hurricanes within six weeks was definitely a disastrous catastrophe!)  In 2004, Charley, Frances, and Jeanne came to visit. Charley tore much of our roof off on August 14th. Frances left a hole and water damage in the house. Jeanne arrived on September 25th.  Our lives weren’t the same for months afterward as we cleaned, repaired, and tossed.

If you asked us if we would like to spend seven solid hours hunched over in the crawl space of our home with just an inch or two of wood separating us from hurricane-force winds, I’m sure we would have turned down the offer. That is, however, what our family did in the summer of 2004 as the third hurricane to rip up our roof banged and tore at our remaining shingles. We fashioned forty-one containers from anything imaginable and carried down at least five gallons of water out of the attic. Today, we still have several stains on our ceilings, but the ...

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