So send I you

I only have a few minutes here. Daniel is getting ready to head out to the villages to preach, and I drove into town here for a few minutes to check our email. We still have no phone/internet in our home; it may be quite a while before it's repaired. So I just wanted to let everyone know we are alive and well and back to normal.
I was telling one of my friends in an email that Daniel always laughs when I say "normal". It seems that the last several years...ever since we entered into the ministry...that the times of "normal" and times of trial/difficulties have seem to run about even. :)
I was pondering this upon my bed this weekend. The house is swarming with flies and when I say swarming I mean there are hundreds...they cover most everything. You can't kill them as fast as they enter. After the rains, they often get plagues here. We've had plagues of crickets, flies, and other little critters. I was lying on my bed because I was so sick. I had a high fever, terrible headache, cough and just ached everywhere; I felt absolutely miserable for 3 days.
How quickly the devil wants to discourage me with thoughts of defeat! I began dwelling on how I'd work so hard to get everything cleaned up from the hurricane and get everything prepared for school this week and now the house was a mess, some of the children were under the weather too and so whiny, and oh those pesky flies that just made my throbbing head spin!
It is times like these that I force myself to journal. I will write down just how I am feeling and then open my Bible and find Scripture to combat those thoughts/feelings. I don't have my journal with me, but I wrote verses about how His strength is made perfect in our weakness. I wrote that our labor is not in vain in the Lord. I wrote that we are to take up our cross and follow Him. To rejoice when we fall into divers temptations knowing that the trying of our faith worketh patience.
As I look at my journal entries over the years, no matter how badly I felt or how hopeless things seemed, I see how the Lord was always there, always faithful, and always at work. I can look back and see what I couldn't see at the time I was in the midst of the trial. And how it has increased my love for my Lord and built my faith. Oh, it is still so small I feel, but how I thank my God who never stops working in me!
Through sicknesses, lonliness, slanders, times without, hard hearts, hard endless work...How good is our Lord! He says "So send I you". What a privilege so endure such small sufferings for His sake as He endured so much greater for mine.