The text message arrived at 9 p.m. last night.  Stephanie was in labor and at the hospital.  Then shortly after midnight it was followed with the happy news that their baby daughter had safely entered the world. 

Married seven years, they never wavered in their hope that God would yet bless them with children.  Their church tried all sorts of means to pray them into a pregnancy.  They finally stopped going to these events for childless couples.  They just clung to the Lord and moved forward by faith.  And that is her name.  Faithful.  Named for the God Who is faithful.  He can do what no man can do.

An entire year had gone by.  Exactly. And then it happened.  Someone penetrated our compound.  It's not all that hard to scale the wall.  I used to be able to do it.  They went into the carport and scattered things we have stored there.  Made quite a mess.  Didn't find anything of interest.  Cut the security bars on the downstairs bedroom window.  And then got scared off.  Joseph went outside to burn trash in the middle of the night.  Did that scare them off?  We cannot say.  By God's grace is was nothing more than that.  Had they penetrated the bedroom they could have stolen a floor fan and a desk lamp.  Nothing more.  Then when they went to open the door to enter the rest of the house, a loud crash would have invaded their senses.  Our low tech security system works very well.  You turn the door handle and down goes a  tin  cup.  That would have scared them right back out the window and over the wall.  But our real security, our real protection, is in the Lord.   We trust in Him.

So we were cleaning out the storage area underneath the stairs today.  And yes, that does mean we are nearing the end of the annual Spring Housekeeping event.  Just one and a half more bedrooms to go.  But we have that on hold while the group is here.

Great day to tackle the storage stuff.  No telling what's going to come spilling out.  Amazingly, and I do mean AMAZINGLY, Papa Jim is in the giving away mood today.  He gave some plumbing stuff and some garden stuff to Guy.  But the really big event was when he pulled out his automotive tool box and said he could give some things to Eric, our favorite taxi man.  To our surprise, Eric does a lot of his own mechanical repairs.  And all with just a couple of tools.  He was surprised, delighted, and ecstatic to get so many nice tools. But he wasn't nearly as ecstatic as I was to see those tools that haven't been used in 16 years go out to door.  And it came with a promise of more tools and maybe even a tool box.  Life is looking good on my side of the fence.  Eric's side, too.

We have a group of ladies here now.  They are all pastors wives.  There's supposed to be 20 of them, but there were only 15 when I came upstairs for the night.  Others have come so we might be up to 20.  They are here for some planning meetings.  They have come in from all over Cameroon.  It's been a fair amount of work having them here.  Coming and going and then coming back again.  Their cook needing this and then that.  And do we have enough dishes?  Tomorrow a friend of mine is coming to spend an hour with them.  It will be nice to see her again.  She's a missionary from Bamenda.

Went to visit Mama Regine today.  We had helped her get some shelves in her store and expand her stock.  Her place looks really nice.  Her customers are impressed that she is expanding and getting shelves so soon.  They don't know about us.  

Ingrid, who lives across the street, came over to visit.  So Ingrid, Eric, and I each bought whatever we wanted.  I found some brooms to replace ours that are wearing out.  We supply brooms for each bathroom.  And I also found little packets of cookies for Samuel who came with his Mommy.  His "thank you Grandma" made it all worthwhile.  We pray that her business will continue to grow and she can become self sufficient.

It's been a busy day.  Still doing Spring housecleaning.  That's a major job to put it mildly.  We have just two more bedrooms to clean and then we go outside.  There are porches and balconies, a driveway, flower beds, the back area, and the storage room to go.  It shouldn't take too many more weeks.  We've cleaned deeper and farther this year than ever before.  Last year we concentrated on getting rid of things we don't really need.  So this year we went after the dirt in a bigger way.

Tonight the house is fairly full.  Then on Thursday we have a group of ladies who will come in for the weekend.  So we will clean around them.  Eventually we will finish for another year.

I was asked to make breakfast the first day of Family Camp.  So I packed up some homemade granola, homemade yogurt, some English muffins made by a Cameroonian friend of ours, several cartons of juice, mangos (it's mango season so we have to take advantage of it), eggs, and jelly.  

Other ladies took their turn making either breakfast or lunch or dinner.  We had yummy things like lasagnia, taccos, and pizza cooked over the grill. 

Then one night we built a bonfire and made smores.  When we were winding down on the smores someone started singing and we all joined in.  We spent the next hour singing every song we could think of.  Things like "There Is Power In The Blood", "I'm Saived, Saived, Saived", "All Hail The Power Of Jesus Name" and many, many others.  It was a wonderful time.

On Thursday night, after our final teaching session, we had a dessert event.  There were cakes and cookies and bars, plus popcorn.  We all ate more than we should, but it was so good.  And we talked and talked until late.  We finally broke up and headed for bed.  The following morning after our last breakfast, we loaded the cars and headed down the mountain.  Our sixth Family Camp was over. Family Camp has been going on for a lot more years than that, but we were not part of it in the early years.