Here we are with our squad again! It has been fun to hear so many awesome stories of how God was working in all these different places, and so fantastic to live in a place with a real supermarket again! Yesterday I splurged on my first Diet Dr. Pepper of the Race – well worth it!
One of our favorite stories to tell has been about God’s provision for the Bibles for Malawi fundraiser. Right after the campaign began, we started having problems with our Internet. A couple of days later when we finally got reconnected, we were blown away by the fact that we had surpassed our goal in such a short time! Thank you to those of you who heard God’s call to share or donate! We purchased 20 Bibles to pass around while we were still in Nkhotakota and Timothy Harvest Ministries will be able to buy nearly 80 more (something I believe Pastor Antony did yesterday after dropping us off in the capital).
We were hoping to revisit the village where the idea for the fundraiser was sparked after our 2 days of door-to-door evangelism there, but unfortunately we never got the chance to. (I’m glad to know that there is at least one Bible there already, left by Tapiwa, our translator.) Instead, this past Monday we drove to a Baptist church where some of us had attended the Sunday service a week before. The pastors from that church and another down the road, who are continuing our ministry in that village, had picked a group of 15 people to come and receive Bibles. (The other 5 were given to members of THM’s Wednesday Bible Study group.)
The morning began just like a worship service, with prayers and lots of singing and dancing. Emma and Anna N. explained how we had felt called to get the Word of God to the people we’d met during our time in Malawi and how powerful a tool the Bible is.
And then it got weird.
They had the seven of us stand at the front of the church, each with a couple of Bibles in hand. The gathered church members formed a line to be handed a Bible, many of them practically bowing as they took them.
When I imagined giving the Bibles away, I pictured us sitting in small groups, talking to people like we had doing door-to-door and home visits. We would listen to their stories, and share our own, and the Bible would be passed from one equal sitting next to another. But instead – although I know this wasn’t the intention – it felt like we were lording this gift over them.
It felt very much about the white people rather than being about God.
I hope it was just me who felt this way, and that the people were so excited to have their own copies of the Word that they couldn’t have cared less who was giving them out. I pray that they never feel “less than” due to the fact that we were able to bless them with material things, because nothing could be further from the truth. I have been so inspired by the steadfastness and faith of all the Malawians I’ve met. This fundraiser wasn’t our doing; it was inspired by the passionate pleas of a few villagers and tended to by the Holy Spirit. We certainly could not have pulled it off alone.
Even though we weren’t able to fully connect with the people who received those 15 Bibles, the Lord was and is working in that village. Case in point: on our way back to our camp, we crammed 20+ people into our 15 passenger minibus so that we could give many of the women (and their babies!) a ride home. We stopped at several different places along the road to drop all of them off. Now, when I think about the awkwardness of that morning, I am reminded that the Bibles we handed out were spread wide across Nkhotakota.
It doesn’t really matter what I felt in that one small moment, it matters how much God is going to do with all those communities where His Word can now be read. And for that, I can do nothing but rejoice and be thankful!
