Today my heart is bursting with joy and thankfulness spending time with my friend, Priscilla. She is married to Leo (Matt’s coworker/boss and partner in the work of justice!). Priscilla and I have found ourselves to be kindred spirits. A lot of my happiest moments in Ghana include her.

She knows about my food allergy to tomatoes (and is also well aware that every Ghanian food includes tomatoes in some form.). So she has been compiling foods to try making without tomatoes. Today she came over and we made palm nut soup

And had to taste it! 🙂

and then used that to make aprapansa (by whisking in a corn flour made of grilled corn)!

This was all that was left after our two families had dinner. It was delicious! Everyone snickered at me for having some baby spinach salad with it (yes I do eat like a rabbit). But it was lovely. Even my kids said that they liked it well enough. Wow!

You might ask what our kids were doing while the moms were spending time in the kitchen cooking and chatting??….

They are in the justice league too. 😆

Today I am thankful for these beautiful flowers my girls picked

And a quiet, peaceful walk (away from honking taxis, exhaust-spewing trotros and slimy, full gutters) through a friends’ estate (a fenced in compound of houses).

It was what my heart and mind needed.

Thank you Lord.

It all worked out just fine. Great actually.

I write this from a van full of my IJM brothers as we rocket down a rough road in the rural countryside of the Volta Region. Our destination is a town on the Eastern shore of Lake Volta, home to the Ewe people. Along the route we will pick up a government social worker and an IJM client who was a victim of child trafficking for 10 years before he was rescued.

Over the next few days we will be training over 250 pastors and church leaders from fishing villages in Biblical Justice and child trafficking issues at what we call The Justice Conference.

The agenda:

Today I will train a group of 10 pastors in how to teach a Bible study curriculum I’ve written with help from Leo.

Tomorrow is the conference where Leo will preach, Daniel (IJM aftercare) will explain trafficking, and our IJM client will share his story. Selorm will lead us in some special music and several local pastors will play upfront roles. I will probably run slides and pray in the background.

Tomorrow night I begin training a group of 50 of the pastors who have been invited to an extended training on the Biblical Justice curriculum. The leaders I train tonight will becone small group leaders tomorrow night.

Friday, we do an all day training on the curriculum.

The hope is that these pastors will become advocates for Justice in their fishing villages, that they will train their churches in Biblical Justice, and join our fight against child trafficking.

If you think of me this July 4th, please say a prayer for our effort here. Ask that God would awaken a fire in the hearts of many for Freedom and Justice. Also, please eat a hamburger and light some fireworks for me too!