Becky Noble is still enjoying supporting church planting through teaching music at Numonohi Christian Academy in Papua New Guinea and counts it a tremendous privilege, but this year has been a tough one for a few different reasons. One of these has been her health. October was a particularly difficult month. Becky was thankful for a good couple of weeks at the beginning of November, but after that, she was struck with a nasty stomach bug, followed by a week of headaches. At one point, it was 38.5C in her house, which did not help with battling a migraine! There is a way to possibly make her home cooler, but she is waiting for the maintenance team to have time to do this work.
This term she has had the privilege of starting an orchestra twice a week after school. This has been encouraging, but with such a wide range of abilities, including some complete beginners on instruments that she does not play, this has been more work than expected. She has continued running the Ethnotes choir (33 members), teaching/supervising nine individual instrument lessons, along with helping out in the elementary office, teaching her usual music classes during the school day and being involved in all the extra rehearsals that come with preparing a Christmas Concert. In short, she is pretty exhausted and sometimes just praying for strength to get through a day instead of enjoying it.
Becky has curtailed some activities and started saying “no”, but this is hard. Please particularly be praying that the Lord would sustain her for the Christmas Concert on Saturday 14th December and help all the preparations come together.
At the moment, the Christmas Concert is a big focus for Becky, but please pray that her primary focus would be love, both for the Lord and others. Your prayers for her health and concerts are much appreciated, but please do be praying above all that she will grow in godliness and that God would be glorified. “Glory to God in the Highest!” All the music classes have been learning to sing Luke 2:8-14 this term. As always it has been great to unpack the many truths in these verses with the children. Recently they have been considering God’s glory.
Please remember Becky’s family and friends back in the UK, especially over the Christmas period. Also pray that she would make the most of the opportunities she has to encourage local people and for wisdom as it is not always clear where they stand.
Becky is three quarters of the way through her two year teaching commitment. Please pray for her to have a refreshing Christmas break and for wisdom to know how to manage the workload next term. Pray for the Lord’s guidance in the coming months regarding what she will be doing at the end of this school year. On Wednesday 8th January she has a meeting with the school management team and would value prayer.