"If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested they aren't values. They're hobbies." - Jon Stewart

I worked on the truck some today. Got a new fuel filter installed and fired it up for a few minutes. I'm not going to let it sit like it did before. But the list of issues grows. Now the oil pressure gauge doesn't work. I suspect the small tube from the engine to the gauge is plugged.

I got the garden's four raised beds mostly made - cut the 4' ends and installed the corner blocks. I just have to attach the 8' side boards.

I went into Home Depot and got 28 bats of R-15 insulation which I'll install tomorrow.
And I spent an hour digging. I wanted to see if I could hand dig the 2' deep trench that has to run about 150' from MoHo's power box down to Fred. The answer is yes, so long as I don't want it done before 2018. On my way home from Home Depot I stopped by United Rentals and learned about renting a walk-behind trencher.
I did get the part of the trench dug that goes under Fred so the power can enter from below. That had to be done by hand.

Before all of that I finished prep on the 4-session part of the pastors' conference I'll teach on church leadership and emailed the handouts off to Cory in Mbeya so he can translate them into Swahili.
The internet is amazing.

I wrote the above paragraphs last night intending to add to them, then my brain died. I tried a couple of times to continue but just couldn't. So what follows was written today in installments that started shortly after I got up, so if all this seems disconnected, it was.

I read a week or so ago that the Italian author Umberto Eco died. He wrote The Name of the Rose, a mystery about a murder that took place in a monastery. I read it when it came out in 1980 and really liked it, but can't remember much more than that.
I have a 10-hour flight from Portland to Amsterdam, a 3-hour layover, and then an 11-hour flight to Dar es Salaam. I'll (hopefully) sleep for much of that time, but need to have a variety of things to keep my ADD mind from going completely berserk. I have a paperback of the third of three novels in the Poldark series that should last me until New York, so I'm going to get The Name of the Rose for my Kindle.
Any recommendations for games for my Kindle or iPad?

How wet is it in Oregon?
We live on Baker Rd., which is pavement for about 1/4 mile before turning to gravel as it approaches our place. The paved portion has a green tint down the center of each of the two lanes where the moss grows.

We sat this afternoon with the two young girls of a couple at church so they could go ice skating. Their older daughter is 4 and we played with Playdough for awhile. We made dinner. Or was it dessert?

Missionaries should work to plant indigenous churches. (See the last post.)
Where?
First, where it's most needed, where there is no viable witness to the gospel. Many areas have never heard the name Jesus and know nothing of what he did for them. In some cases they live in geographically isolated areas. In others they are culturally isolated, living as an ethnic group isolated from the larger community, like the many Muslim enclaves in countries in Central and South America.
The percentage of evangelicals in a given country is not the key criterion for deciding to send missionaries. Last I read, fewer than 3% of Brits attend an evangelical church on a Sunday morning, with a similar rate for Australia. But that's an indication of their spiritual insensitivity. Both countries have a viable evangelical testimony, and that statistic is an indication of response to the gospel. Expending very limited resources to send missionaries to start indigenous churches in England doesn't make much sense when there are 850 language groups in Papua New Guinea, most of whom have never heard the name of Jesus.

Yeah, I've got some convictions about this topic.