The Lord's Day in Freetown

Sunday, February 19, 2012

John Smith with today’s blog entry:

It has been a beautiful Lord’s Day here in Freetown. The temperatures are quite mild for this time of year and we have enjoyed sitting on our veranda watching the sunset. Supper is always eaten at the outdoor café of the Lighthouse Restaurant. I actually felt a faint chill as we finished supper. That is such a relief to the weather we have experienced in the past. If you move away from the beach to the city, weather conditions change rapidly and markedly. There is very little breeze in the city and the air quite stagnant. The smells cannot be described.

David went to Wellington to preach this morning. The east side of town is totally different from the west end. The poverty is greater, crime more pronounced and there is a stronger Islamic presence. The building at Wellington is little more than a thatched, dirt floor building, but it serves their purposes quite nicely, except during the rainy season when it floods with some regularity. Property laws are different that in the states. While the church owns the building they do not own the land on which the building sits. As a result, the land owner is evicting them as of April 1st. As of yet they have not found any alternative and are not sure what they will do. For most of them travelling into Priscilla Street is not an option because of distance and cost of transport.

David preached a sermon entitled, “When in Baptism Scriptural?” There were somewhere around 30 present and most of them are young. John Kabul does a wonderful work among the youth of his neighborhood.

After services David got to tour a typical Sierra Leonean house and gardens. To say the least it was an eye opening experience.

I went to Priscilla Street this morning. Attendance started off slow, but gradually grew till we literally had a packed house. I would estimate the crowd at over 80. Theophilus taught a lesson on the Victory of Faith which melded well into my lesson on the Road to Salvation. At the end of service two precious souls made the good confession and were baptized into Christ. One more is giving it serious consideration and a young man said he would be ready tomorrow. Let us pray for these two souls.

I have had my first Sierra Leonean accident. I was sitting on the veranda and turned to tell David the maid was coming in when the leg of a plastic chair broke sending me rapidly to the tile porch. My hip hit the tile and my head hit the sliding glass door. The door is not broken and no tile was broken in the fall. However, I cannot say the same thing for my hip. It appears to be bruised and is very sore. Tomorrow might be a challenge.

We have profited from and enjoyed our first Lord’s Day in Freetown and look with pleasant anticipation to the next one.