The other day, I went to get Hannah one of her tasty little vitamins, when I found that the large container, which had been half full the day before, now contained only 4 lonely little vitamins. It didn’t take me long to figure out who the culprit was. Meme loves those vitamins, and is always begging me to give her one. I did question the rest of the family to find out if there were any other vitamin hungry people, and found that they did not even know I had vitamins for Hannah! So, I was a bit troubled. First of all, if Meme ate that many vitamins at one time, she should be sick or something! And then, there is the issue of stealing that which doesn’t belong to you. That evening, I went to Kentegee, my trusty translator, and talked to her about the problem. She then told me some things that I did not know before. (Her family has been neighbors with Meme’s family for a long time) I was told that Meme’s mother was not a good person. (I had that figured out already, since she threw away her daughter!) She taught Meme from the time she was little to do her stealing for her. She also taught her to lie and cheat. No wonder Meme’s father said that he had tried to get others to take Meme, but nobody would! So, how do you train an 8 year old that doesn’t understand English? To complicate matters, we also received a report that she is also not doing well at school. So today we have to go and have a talk with her teachers.  This is going to take a lot of prayer and wisdom from above! There are many times that I feel SOOOOO inadequate for this job!

Then, the other day Kentegee came home from school and quietly informed me that she was going to have to drop out of school. It turns out that her exams are scheduled for Sabbath. We tried to get it changed, but they will not budge. The director of the school told her that they always have the tests on Sabbath, so it will do no good for her to continue. We had a long talk about it last night. She wanted to know if I thought that God wanted her to keep studying or not. I really don’t know, but I did ask her to spend a few days praying about it, and ask God what he would have her do with her life. She is very gifted with languages, and could really help the cause of God if she chose to. (More recently update) Yesterday Kentegee went to visit her Mother to talk over her school problem with her. When she came back she informed me that she would be going to live with her sister today. This was quite a blow to us, and we are still kind of in shock about it. Kentegee also seemed pretty sad about it. I had already found a way around her problem, but I decided not to interfere at this point. We will just pray that God’s will would be done in her life.

Now for the rest of the verse that I started with….We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair! 2 Corinthians 4:8 Each new set of trials makes us depend more fully on God for help. If everything were easy, we might think that we were pretty good missionaries, and would probably not feel so needy of God’s help. So praise God for the trials!