Marc Mailloux's Blog

“My grace is sufficient is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  II Cor.12:9                           JUNE 2009

Dear friends,

        It was an inauspicious beginning to a long (32-hour) trip including flights from Ft. Lauderdale to N.Y., N.Y. to Paris, and finally Paris to Lomé, Togo, where I arrived exhausted and envious of people who can sleep on airplanes.  Salomon, the Togolese program coordinator for the ITAO (“Institut Théologique d’Afrique de l’Ouest” or ITAO) and Moses, a church-planter from nearby Ghana, met me at the airport and drove me to the hotel “Minba la Licorne”  where I’d be staying.  I went right up to the room hoping to get some badly needed rest but instead was overcome with an allergic reaction to something in the room resulting in the asthmatic’s terror: I couldn’t breathe. In my panic I sent up a desperate, breathless prayer.    Fortunately, I had an old “Ventolin” respirator I hadn’t used in years in my toilet articles from which I took a couple of shots. It helped.  I still couldn’t sleep but at least I could breathe.  As I lie looking at the ceiling, I prayed with the premonition that my aforementioned health issue might have been an Enemy attack to discourage me before even starting what I’d come to do. I came for a week of teaching (30 projected hours of classes) for a group of 11 Togolese and 2 Ivory Coast pastors eager to study some basic principles of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), which I would be doing thanks to copious notes mostly from the works of R.C. Sproul and Bryan Chapell, translated and adapted for the course.    

    In my jet-lagged insomnia, I watched some Togolese television which featured a number of news programs from France (Togo was a French colony until 1960), including a surprisingly evangelical Roman Catholic broadcast, and even “Al Jazeera.”  Alas, even the monotone voice of a mufti reading to the faithful the Koran in Arabic from a mosque in Jordan didn’t put me to sleep. 

  Salomon and Moses picked me up at around noon for lunch before Sunday afternoon worship. We ate African  “Djekoumé” (a pasty corn flour concoction served with a spicy sauce; an acquired taste for sure) at the teaching center a little over a mile away up the  road crammed with death-defying  motorbikes and bicycles, in addition to the usual cars and trucks. African roads are unlit at night, and the fact that many vehicles have no lights makes driving hairy.  “The drivers in Ghana are much more disciplined,” insisted Moses as he navigated ITAO’s Toyota-Previa through the sandy mostly unpaved roads.    Must be the English influence, I thought.  

       I was up early Monday. No need for an alarm clock as the roosters in the street in front of the hotel inform you promptly when the sun comes up a little before 5:00 AM.  I strolled around the already bustling neighborhood, on heavily travelled sandy paths already saturated with thousands of people going about their business, including hundreds of petty roadside merchants—men and women—selling a handful of peanuts, or a couple ears of grilled corn or whatever other sundries they carried here. Life is a hustle for most Togolese; a struggle to survive on a few cents’ profit gleaned from the rest of the mostly struggling masses.  Togo (pop. 5 million) is of course dirt poor, though I doubt many actually starve in this part of the country at least,  as the country is blessed with mango, coconut palms, and papaya trees, in addition to the bananas and corn one sees everywhere.  The spiritual diet is another thing.  

  The country is about 32% Christian (mostly Catholic), 30% Moslem, and the rest a mixture of indigenous beliefs.  The official language is French though most also speak “Ewe” as in neighboring Ghana and Benin.    The students in the ITAO program (Organized in cooperation with New Harvest Mission and Mission to the World) are a refreshing group of Reformed pastors eager to learn anything that helps them as they labor in the Lord’s Kingdom in their part of the world. A couple of them (Pastors Nestor and Siriki) flew over from Ivory Coast for the course.

            After Moses picked me up at the hotel at 6:30, we had a cup of coffee at the study center and started the day with a half-hour devotional that included joyful singing and dancing to the glory of the Savior.  Pastor Siriki, a converted Moslem, expressed his bewilderment at the comparative inflexibility of the American worship he witnessed during a recent trip to the U.S. “Whites don’t dance,” I told him.  “We didn’t get a rhythm gene; or perhaps it vanished from the gene pool somewhere along the way, along with our capacity to make melanin.”  None of the others had ever been to the US nor even continental France, so they were understandably curious about life in the Western world and dismayed at what I told them of the pathetic size of the church in Western Europe.  They all followed the course attentively, growing in appreciation for the radial nature of the Christian gospel in a legalist world, as underlined in Dr. Chapell’s Christ Centered Preaching upon which much of the teaching was based.  

    In spite of my fatigue and the extreme heat, the courses (6 hours/day) the first day of classes went surprisingly well. His strength is indeed made perfect in our weakness. Great is His faithfulness!

  The rest of the week went without incident.  We finished on Friday with an exam, after which the pastors (save the two from Ivory Coast) hurried home to their respective churches for the weekend as Dr. Tom Wright arrived from Senegal to teach the next week of classes on the Old Testament.

   As for me, it was time to be heading back to the US to prepare my lessons for both the Haitian Bible school in Florida and our students in St. Martin.  My Air France flight was supposed to leave Lomé airport on Saturday night, May 23 at 22h, but was delayed for “technical reasons” (in fact, two of the crew members were involved in an accident in Togo on the way to the airport) until 6AM.  So I spent my last night in Togo talking with Eden (a forty year old nominally protestant, French-Togolese pharmacist) about the gospel. It occurred to me, that in God’s scheme, that might be the real reason for the flight delay. In any case, by the time we got to Paris, after a long sleepless night, I’d missed my Paris-New York connection. Air France put me in an airport motel and rebooked me the next day on their nine-hour flight to Atlanta, after which another two hour flight to Ft. Lauderdale still awaited me.  It had taken me 32 hours to get to Togo and 52 hours for the trip home! That left a lot of time to read and write this letter. What I wouldn’t give to be able to sleep on a plane…                        

                                                                                                                                                                                                      Blessings,

Praise: 1-For a blessed (healthy+ useful) Togo trip. 

 2- For the Lord’s protection on my wife and son in my absence.                                             

3- For the delightful receptiveness of the African students.

Prayer:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

 1-For Christian host families for French adolescents (14-18) coming to the US this summer (mid-July to mid-August). For information in the Carolinas contact Rich Wagner: francorw@aol.com 

 2- For the next series of classes in St. Martin (scheduled June 29-July 5)

  3-For the spiritual and professional welfare of our sons Calix (29) and Justin (27).