Hemmed in prayer

Hello, my dear friends. Today is Thursday and at OM, Thursday is usually prayer meeting night. That is our practice at MTS, where each Thursday evening prayer requests are shared and a short presentation is made by one of the groups going to a particular country. This evening the five people who are going to Albania shared some information and prayer requests about that country.
(Su'en and Micah are two of the five people who will be going to Albania.) It was very interesting, as Albania was a completely closed country until about 15 years ago and since that time, many new churches have been established, and there are many new believers. Parnesh & son Reuben The couple who are directing our training - Heather and Parnesh - were part of the first OM
team that went into Albania those years ago and so they have had some interesting stories to share about those first days in Albania. For example, as they were driving into the city,
Heather on right, baby Elona in carriage
Parnesh became very annoyed that all the silly
people were walking in the middle of the road. He said they were likely to get hit by a car, but then the host informed him that there were only
8 cars in the whole city, so people weren't too worried about getting hit!!

Anyway, as well as prayer meeting tonight, we have been learning about language acquisition all this week. I now know that the first Heather on right, baby Elona in carriage three months of my time in Moldova will be spent with a host family in Chisenau and my main responsibility will be to learn the language. I will have a language helper with whom I will meet most days and spend other parts of the day getting out in the community and practising what I am learning. Then at the end of the three months I will stay for a week in a Moldovan village before then being assigned to my specific area of responsibility.
One of the assignments we have each week is to work on memorizing a portion - and eventually all- of Psalm 139. Last week one of the verses said, "You hem me in - behind and before". Micah said it reminded her of being zipped up cozily in a sleeping bag. I was thinking about my prayer supporters - those at home praying for me and those ahead, in Moldova, praying for me. I am so grateful for your prayers and I do have two requests to share:

1. Please pray for me in the process of language learning. It will be hard work but I know I can do it if I maintain the discipline I need. We are being given lots of guidelines this week, but once I get to Moldova I will be largely responsible for directing what form the learning takes.
http://www.eliznik.org.uk/RomaniaHistory/language.htm

2. Please pray for Airton, a member of the Moldovan team, who was sent out of the country the other day and will not be able to get back into Moldova. He is staying here at the OM Centre and trying to figure out what comes next in his life. This is a huge disappointment to him and a loss for the team.

3. Praise God that He is sovereign over all things and that we can trust Him day by day if we put our hope in His word, and in the living Word, Jesus Christ.