November 7, 2006

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Cairo! We'd like to share some things that lead us to give thanks and also a few ways we'd appreciate your continued prayers.

We are thankful to be in Egypt. We feel so grateful that Egypt has become a place where we and our boys are relatively happy and thriving. As a family, I think we're learning that happiness has more to do with who we're with and what we're doing, than with where we are. We've also realized that the ministry of the seminary is a good fit for us. We've seen relationships with Egyptian friends and colleagues deepen, and our friendships from our international church and the boys' school are also becoming rich and rewarding. We have friends we can pray with, talk honestly with, and simply enjoy—and we realize these are gifts one cannot take for granted no matter where one lives.

As you might guess, one of the biggest issues a family faces when doing overseas mission service is how to make the experience a good one for the kids. One thing that has helped us is Cairo Covenant School, where Clayton and Christopher attend. We feel extremely grateful for it. It’s a warm, caring, and fun place, just five minutes from our home. It has about 40 kids in ten grades. It’s a wonderful Christian school with students from many different countries. We also love the teachers and the principal. Despite living in a city of 16 million, sometimes it feels like we have the community experience of a small town, because many of the teachers also attend our church and two of them even live in our building. We'd appreciate your prayers for the school's ability to find enough teachers for the long term. Please also feel free to spread the word of this need!

I also feel grateful for my students at the seminary. They are eager, sincere, and appreciative. Just this week one of the students in my 1 Corinthians course turned in his mid-term paper, said thank you to me (many of the students actually thanked me for the assignment), and told me that for 12 years he has yearned to be able to read and interpret the Bible for himself as he has learned to do through this course. In America we sometimes take for granted the chance to learn to read and understand Scripture (and other books) for ourselves. But our seminary students were generally raised to repeat back what teachers have told them, not to read in order to understand. I feel blessed to get to help these future pastors and leaders of churches in the Middle East to grow in their ability to understand Scripture and discover for themselves what God has to say.

Sherri and I also feel thankful for the progress we've made with Arabic. This has been an answer to prayer. Sherri has been able to increase her focus on it now that Christopher is in school, and she has also found an excellent new teacher. I continue to give the first portion of each lecture in Arabic, but these 15 to 30 minutes require 6 to 8 hours of preparation. Next semester, my teaching load at the seminary will triple, which means that my current 13 hours/week of Arabic lessons will decrease quite a lot. This is a little bothersome, because I still feel a need for more intensive Arabic study. Please pray that I will keep progressing and not be discouraged because of less time to study Arabic. A solid knowledge of the language would make a huge difference in being able to train and encourage our students, most of whom have very limited English.

Thank you for your prayers for our safety (please keep it up!); we'd also appreciate prayers for our health, as we deal with Cairo's air pollution. Cairo is the world’s second smokiest city, and October is the worst month of the year, due especially to local farmers burning rice chaff after the harvest. It was a very difficult month for most of our family and many of our colleagues and friends. Our apartment was quite smoky almost every evening until the wind picked up around 10:00 a.m. the next day and cleared things a bit. It’s hard to describe what it’s like not being able to get a breath of decent air. We wonder what long-term effects the pollution may have on our health. We read with interest an article on the world’s smokiest cities. It mentions that Cairo’s air is almost five times smokier than Los Angeles and over seven times worse than New York City. We appreciate your prayers.

Please also pray that Sherri and I would have wisdom about when to say yes and when to say no to opportunities for ministry. We're surrounded by much more desire and need for ministry than we feel able to carry out. Sherri and I can get exhausted fulfilling basic responsibilities in ministry, language learning, and family life. Cross-cultural life and ministry are tiring. Like so many others in ministry, we need wisdom to know what it means to take some risks and give our lives to others while also living in a way that will help us to stay the course in spiritual, emotional, and physical health.

There is so much more we could say. Please do pray also for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s continued financial ability to keep people overseas doing ministry such as ours.

We want you to know that we plan to be on “interpretation assignment” in the United States for approximately the second half of 2007. We hope to spend chunks of time in North Carolina, Kentucky, Minnesota, and California, and perhaps travel to other places as well. Feel free to be in touch as we begin to make plans. We’ll be available to speak in a variety of church settings and we want to catch up with as many of you as possible.

Grace and peace,

Dustin and Sherri Ellington

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 165