There are nights like tonight where I lay in bed and think there’s a stomach or liver in my stomach. Granted that really isn’t that big of a deal and by far not the weirdest thing one can eat while in Africa, but it’s the concept. Also I certainly don’t eat cow stomach multiple times a week back at home.
Mozambique was thus far my favorite country and hardest. I have described my last month in Africa as “home away from home”. So much of what I did and do back at home is what I did in Mozambique. We were helping LifeChurch and it was a branch off of the “home base” church in Quelimane and it was fairly new,only a year or so. One of their main focus was college ministry, and the majority of their congregation is young. Our actual ministry was simply to just be a presence on campus, we were dropped off each morning and we weren’t told to go and have ten converts by lunch but rather to go and meet the students as people and to build relationships. This was great because it’s something that I really love to do back at home and on my campus, to not be a “closeted Christian” and to simply love on my peers. At first it was a little awkward but then we started what we called the “Uno Ministry” where we would invite the students around us to a soda and play uno, which was a lot easier than to interrupt their studying to talk.
One of the main ministries of the church was cell-groups, which is what we call
study groups/community groups/bible study groups. So every Friday and Saturday we were all split up in them with various different leaders, and I absolutely loved when Saturdays evenings came around because the only group I was in that I didn’t have to rotate out with anyone else was the teenage cell-group. Again home away from home; I led in high school ministry for the last four years and it is something that I have a passion for. The first week was simply getting to know them, and the last two was seeing them around the neighborhood and taking them out for ice cream and playing card games, talking about Jesus in broken portugues, spanish, and english, but those were some of the sweetest conversations I had all month.
And then also I have introduced you to my host for the month Adelson and Vina who treated me and loved me the way my closest friends back at home do. I went into month 3 thinking that I was okay and that yes I missed home but I could swallow the missing feeling and continue on. I didn’t know just how much I missed my family and friends back at home, but God did. God knew that I needed to feel cared for again and loved on and he gave that to me in the form of these lovely folks. It amazed me just how much the body of Christ could love one another even though never having met another before but still open their homes and hearts to them. They were simply wonderful and it hurt to have to leave them.
Month 3 in Mozambique was literally home away from home, there were these three main ones and many others that I can’t begin to recant.
