My daughter recently sent me this e-mail:

According to a radio report, a middle school in Oregon was faced with a unique problem. A number of girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the restroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick, they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.

Finally the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the restroom and met them there with the maintenance man. She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night.

To demonstrate how difficult it was the clean the mirros, she asked the maintenance guy to clean one of the mirrors. He took a long-handled squeegee, dipped it into a toilet, and then cleaned the mirror with it.

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirrors. There are teachers, and then there are teachers!

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Training Teachers in Kiev

In Kiev, Ukraine we just took a giant step toward training teachers who really know how to get the message across to their students. In September, we opened Evangel Theological Seminary [ETS]. Its mission is to train instructors to teach in the Bible schools of the former Soviet Union. I don't know if the'll be using methods exactly like the one I described above, but I'm sure they'll return to their own classroom equipped to teach Bible, Theology, and Pastoral Ministry courses. Their students will fan out across more than half of the northern hemisphere of this globe, from Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia in the west, to Siberia and points even further east.

I have chaired an ETS planning committee that worked for about three years, and have helped pull together its well-equipped library of about 20,000 hand-picked volumes. We praise the Lord how all that worked out. Africa Library Services Office [ALSO] provided valuable guidance for selecting and purchasing the library holdings and equipment. A team of volunteers worked at a cataloguing workshop we set up in Springfield. They catalogued 16,000 books in 12 months--a Herculean effort! Then ALSO shipped it all to ETS in a 40' shipping container.

ALSO's warehouse flooded only about a week after they were shipped, with the loss of several other library collections and books totally almost $500,000 in retail value. We praise the Lord that the ETS library was safely shipped. And we pray that ALSO will be able to recover from these losses quickly and re-prepare the library shipments for other schools awaiting them.

Recent Schedule

A few weeks ago I was in Slovenia talking with Bible school workers there. A few days ago I was in Spain talking with Bible school leaders from Spain, USA, and Argentina about working together to promote ministerial education efforts there in Spain. In a few more weeks Janice and I will be in Tbilisi, Georgia talking with leaders there who are working to start a new Bible school out there in the Caucuses. And then it's off to Oradea, Romania to teach Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) just before Christmas break. After that it's off to an education conference in Kiev, Ukraine and then to India to teach graduate students at Southern Asia Bible College.

As you can see, we keep a busy travel schedule, working with Bible school leaders and teaching whenever we get the opportunity in this busy schedule.

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Prayer & Praise

• Praise the Lord for his protection of the ETS library shipment.
• Pray for Africa Library Services, which suffered huge losses iin the flash flood of early July.
• Pray that they'll recover economically, and that they'll be able to replace the lost books from book shipments that were meant for other Bible school libraries.

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