View this email in your browser Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, South Sudanese, Sudanese, Syrian … These are the nationalities claimed by my students in the two-week Isaiah class I’m teaching here at Beirut’s Arab Baptist Theological Seminary. Each one of them has a story. Some of those narratives involve intense suffering for the gospel, including prison. Only a few of my students speak English, so I enjoy the camaraderie of Walid, an excellent translator and friend.. This man directs the academic program at ABTS and is pursuing advanced studies of his own in Old Testament. We also share a hair style, so if one of us falls in a hole the other one can just pick up where we left off. No one may notice. The half of my responsibilities that involves directing the Theological Education Initiative (TEI) requires me to remain active in Majority-World seminaries beyond the horizons our new main bailiwick in Latin America. After thirteen years spent largely outside the classroom, I rise to this challenge with joy and trembling. I feel as though I’m learning to teach all over again in a way that fits the things I’ve learned at 58 years of age that I didn’t know when I was 28, 38, or 48. I’ll teach short classes twice a year in seminaries like this one. This forced re-immersion in the Book of Isaiah is timely preparation for writing the Spanish-language commentary on Isaiah that is one of my goals for the next few years. I did my doctoral work on this biblical book back in the 1990s and for the last year have read a chapter of Isaiah every day as a pump-priming exercise for the writing. The ideas and fresh understanding are flowing as quickly as I can keep up with them. Providence draws together the disparate strands at just the right moment. I’m pumped. While enjoying an introvert’s quiet lunch with the seminary’s president—my dear friend Elie Haddad—in the school’s dining hall, a group of forty Christian university students from Syria rolled in. Simply beautiful young people, most of them from Damascus. One can only imagine, peering into these gorgeous Arab faces, what trauma they have known in that disintegrating nation where no eyes remain untouched by smoke and tears, no ears innocent of screams. Yet God has not abandoned his love for Syria nor given up on the Syrian people. Christ is alive among them. It shows in the presence of these students, all participants in Syria’s New Life Agape(Cru) movement. The heart migrates between the breaking and the leaping spaces as the Egyptian and Lebanese couple that leads this group explain with beaming faces how the Lord is at work in, of all places, Syria. They’d be in no other place in this fine and terrible moment. Isaiah said it: The nations shall flow like a river to Zion. Here, citizens of eight of them gather around the biblical book that bears that prophet’s name. We have reached 81% of our financial support goal! It’ll be important to reach 100% by December 31. Will you consider joining our team? Click here to join our amazing support team. Me homesick? Are you kidding? I know, it kind of snuck up on me. I haven’t used the ‘h word’ of myself in thirty years. But on this long international itinerary, which involved meetings in Rome, a visit with colleagues who are dear friends farther north in Italy, and now these two weeks in the Middle East, I find—in and around the joys and challenges of this work—an embarrassing longing for the tall-corn country roads around Millersburg, Pennsylvania. And for the people who travel them home. Not to mention Karen and little Rhea, our newly commissioned Therapy Dog. It’s not true that ‘being away’ in places that are not home—though enriched by the indescribable company of friends—simply ‘flows’.  At least not all the time. Sometimes being here rather than being there is a matter of grit. And the quiet trust that God is in even this. Our little sojourn with our home-and-sending church in Pennsylvania has allowed Karen to visit family in Connecticut, the state that will in 2019 become our home base for half of each year. Left: Connecticut granddaughter Kyla and our doggie Rhea completely ignore brother Quinn’s football practice. Center: Tennessee grandson Connor, who owns his own rocket ship, prepares for the solar eclipse. Right: I’m grateful that this season of life has brought back a core focus on teaching Scripture. ‘Feels good to be working from the center. We’re on our way to Colombia. After a working visit in October, we plan to move there in April. Snippets from the front Our financial support, now at 81.35% of our goal, is creeping towards 100%, where we need it to be by December 31. ‘Wanna join us?  On the front end of this current travel, I participated in an advisory board for the new ICETE Academy, in Rome. The Academy intends to provide micro-bursts of instruction on how to become a great educator (and related topics) to theologians teaching in Majority-World settings who have a specialist’s mastery of their own field, but little or no training in teaching and learning. We’ll travel to the Biblical Seminary of Colombia from October 29 to November 4. Karen will work face-to-face on Spanish with Magdalena and get her claws into the campus apartment that’ll become our home next April. I’ll record Spanish-language voice-overs for the Bible Mesh online training in biblical Hebrew that a team of us at the seminary are adapting and translating for Spanish speakers. A separate seminary team is doing the same for biblical Greek. We’ve begun to consolidate and circulate plans for how we might serve in an ongoing way the cluster of churches that are part of our sending team. Initial conversations are promising and, to be honest, both daunting and exciting. I’m halfway through my online course called Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. I’m taking inputs from two Colombian graduates of our seminary to fashion a final project on how to bring Christ to demobilizing FARC guerillas. Did you know that we maintain a Baerly There … blog? And that David’s blog, Canter Bridgehas been churning out miserable pablum for a decade now? Both Karen and I struggle to go a day without a slice of Shoofly Pie. But we’re racking up serious miles on our bikes, so who cares? Copyright © 2017 United World Mission, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because we believe you may want to stand with our work in Latin America and beyond. Our mailing address is: 739 Church Street, Millersburg, PA 17061 United World Mission is located at: 205 Regency Executive Park Dr Suite 430, Charlotte, NC 28217 800-825-5896 uwm.org Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. This edition of Baerly There … has been brought to you by Shoofly Pie. Spell it right!