Hello from Zambia! We have gotten our fill of interesting travel stories in the three days it took to get here from Lilongwe, Malawi, and I’m finally feeling fully rested again. Team Intrepid has also finally fulfilled a long-prayed-for desire to hold a baby – we live with the pastor and his family, and they have a week old baby granddaughter staying with them! Her name, fittingly, is Blessing. Those stories will be coming shortly, but first I have one more to tell from Nkhotakota.
Throughout all the evangelism my team did last month, we saw many, many people come to Christ. Honestly, the first time we did door-to-door, I was surprised that people said they believed what we told them about Jesus. It seemed too easy. And then it kept happening, over and over again.
At the end of our second week, we found ourselves participating in a Crusade/Seminar that took place at a nearby school. The first night, we watched the Jesus film with a crowd of probably 100 people. Many of them received Christ at the end of the movie, and many were healed of various ailments, including a woman I had met earlier in the day who had been going to doctors for years and never got any better.
And still, I doubted their sincerity. I doubted that people could truly have their lives changed after one encounter with Jesus.
I think maybe it’s because I grew up in the church, because I have always known Jesus as my Savior and developed my relationship with God more gradually, that I had a hard time trusting the depth of these new believers’ conviction.
But throughout the New Testament, there are stories of this exact thing happening.
I was reminded of this the following morning, when we spent several hours in a classroom (squeezed a bit uncomfortably into child-sized desks), hearing our contact, Pastor Banda, and two of our teammates (Mckenzie and Whitney!) speak about Christian life, love, and unity. Acts 2 was referenced several times that morning, and in reading it, this passage really spoke to me:
Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” … So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. (Acts 2:37-38, 41)
Thousands upon thousands of people heard the message of the apostles and believed immediately. It wasn’t because the apostles were so eloquent or holy – it was because God reached into the hearts of the people who listened. In the same way, the villagers we met in Malawi were touched by the words of God spoken to them through my team and the film.
I got a similar reminder a week later. On our last day of Children’s Ministry, we forgot to bring the illustrated Children’s Bible we’d been using to tell stories with us. Someone suggested doing the story of Jonah, so I told it from memory (thanks to the fabulous musicals put on by the children’s choirs at home). In telling it, I thought about how often we leave off the end of the story when we think about Jonah. He famously ran away from God, got swallowed by a whale, and then obeyed God by preaching to the people of Nineveh.
But my favorite part might be the end. Jonah gets mad at God for forgiving the people he’s been ministering to. He gets mad that his message has been received so well, and so God has to teach him another lesson (although this time with a dead tree, not a whale).
I realized, as I was wrapping up the story, that my doubt was not so different from Jonah’s anger. In doubting other peoples’ faith, I had been doubting God’s power and His ability to change hearts. I can’t see into the hearts of the people who prayed with us for the first time – into the hearts of people I have continued to meet and pray with even in these first few days in Zambia – but I trust that God has been, is, and will be working in their lives. It’s not my influence that matters, but His.
