Dear Friends and Family,

We wish you all a blessed Christmas and the Lord’s very best for you in the New Year.

We are now in our own home in Paxton. Thank you for praying concerning the two settlements. The Dubbo settlement took place on Monday 16th and the cheques were sent over to our conveyancer. They arrived in time and the settlement for our Paxton house went ahead on Wednesday 18th December as planned.

We moved up to Paxton on Thursday. Our son David drove a hired van with the furniture we have been given in it and various other items in boxes and suitcases and my brother Graham drove up in his Prado loaded with the more fragile items. Rita and the boys came along as well. It was very good to have them see our home on the very first day.

 

On Friday we started unpacking and here is a photo of Bill relaxing in our partially set up lounge room for a bit after working hard all morning.

We met one of our next-door neighbours the very first evening because he kindly came over to tell us that the bins needed to be put out in the street ready for the rubbish collection the next morning.

We are excited about a possible avenue of ministry. Earlier this month, Bill went with David to a prayer breakfast at David and Rita’s church. The speaker was a man from Cross Road Bible Institute. They have a Bible correspondence course ministry reaching prisoners in many countries around the world. One of the countries is Papua New Guinea. At present there are students from the prisons in Port Moresby and Lae, and the representative is working on gaining access to the Madang prison also. We are going to find out more about becoming instructors with this ministry. The instructor receives each lesson when the student has completed it, checks the answers and writes any necessary explanations, and then sends it back. The lessons are in English but we are hoping we would be allowed to have our PNG students write their answers in Melanesian Pidgin if they are not strong English speakers, and we would write our comments in Melanesian Pidgin also to make it easier for them to understand. We’ll let you know what eventuates after we have contacted the representative and had a training session if we will be going ahead.

God bless you all,

Bill & Lynette Cottam