Valentine’s Day in Liberia, and an American Spiritual

February 14 in Liberia is the same as in the U.S. – Valentine’s Day. It also marks Vickie’s and my 40th wedding anniversary. We will celebrate in April when I return. GraceLife Church hosted a Valentine’s Day dinner party for couples at a member’s home. Couples were instructed to arrive hand in hand and the men served their wives dinner. I did a short devotional: re-read the marriage vows that are customary in Liberia and reminded them that marriage is for keeps and it only gets better. All the men got a kick out of serving their wives and most of them ended up with a take-home plate.

Last Friday I finished another week of teaching – Pastoral Theology. We met every afternoon from 12:45-4:30. Those are tough hours to be in class, especially during the dry season in Liberia, so we kept things moving. We spent an entire day talking about the Health and Prosperity/Deliverance gospel and the entailments that go with it in Liberia. We simply read dozen’s of passages that spoke of our inheritance in heaven, the necessity of suffering for the sake of the gospel, the fact that God sometimes heals in this life but never permanently, and Christ’s call to follow him.