This is month seven. Even with already having completed six full months on the World Race, it still sometimes amazes me with how different each country is. This month, my team and I are placed in Maputo, Mozambique. We are working with a pastor named Eduardo and his family. We have had a full week of ministry under our belts and I honestly have never prayed for more people in one week in my life. Most of our ministry is home and hospital visits praying for people whom we don’t know and barely know their stories. Sometimes, I find it difficult to find joy in this type of ministry because it is so hard to know how to pray and honestly, I haven’t felt the Spirit speaking to me much about what to pray. But just when I feel like I can’t do this anymore, God shows up.
After three days of church services, hospital visits, and home visits, I felt completely worn out and spiritually exhausted. My team along with our translator, Johnny, were walking the streets of a community outside of Maputo and stopping at peoples homes to pray for them. Most visits went like this: We walk up to the door, Johnny talks to them, tells us its ok for us to pray for them, tells us one prayer request they have, we pray, then leave. It didn’t take long before I found myself getting frustrated and discouraged because I wasn’t hearing from the Holy Spirit and I wanting to spend more time with each of the families getting to know them a bit better. Then we came up to a house with an older couple. Johnny is talking to them a bit longer than usual. He then informs us that this couple says they used to be a part of the church but stopped going after the husband got sick and no one from the church came to visit. He said it was very discouraging for him to be laying in the hospital bed and see others get visitors and only his wife was visiting him. He felt abandoned by the church and when he got out of the hospital, he decided that he didn’t want to be involved in the church community anymore. We were able to talk with them a bit, take some pictures, and pray for them. Then that night at the service, we turned towards the back of the room to see them sitting there. He came back to church. Praise Jesus!
It’s stories like that, which shows us why we are doing what we are doing. My prayer is that reconciliation continues to happen between this man and the church.
