Tonight we had over for dinner three Burundian men from my class of first year students.  We talked about the Bible Colleges that they have each taught with in Burundi.  One man teaches at a two-year college designed for students who have not finished primary school.  One teaches at a four-year college that has existed since the 1930s.  Both seminaries lack books and educated teachers.  These three men have each worked as public school teachers, one as an electrician also.  None spoke English before the beginning of the school year.  They were chosen by their denomination, supported by hundreds of gifts to gather just one year of tuition.  Now, as scholarship money dwindles at our seminary, the possibility is slim that they will be able to return for a second and third year to our seminary.  All of them have wives back at home, one of them has four children ages seven and younger.  They dream of being able to afford two more years of school, of being able to bring their wives with them to seminary, of having more people from their seminaries trained with more than high school diplomas.
 
They talked about what their Bible colleges and churches, with very few leaders who have even high school diplomas, have accomplished.  Many refugees who left Burundi over the past decade settled in Mozambique and Uganda, in places where no one is a Christian.  Now these refugees coordinate receiving delegations of missionaries from these students' Burundian churches.  They will receive missionaries who these students of mine are going home to teach.  That makes four short steps from you to, say, a Mozambican village that has never heard of Jesus--from your support of Adam and I and the seminary where we teach, to these Burundian guys, to the people they lead and send, to places that have no churches.  We're that connected.  As they prayed over dinner, one man mentioned "we look forward to the day we will all be in heaven singing to God in all languages," and more than ever I look forward to that day.  There will be so many more people like these men, people that deserve to be heroes in the news but who would never get discovered in mass media, who we can sing with in heaven!