Its hard to believe that month one of the Race is already over! It was a beautiful month filled with laughter, growth, and stepping out into faith in new ways.
Team Zeal and Team Ratsah were partnered together in Ocean View, a small town outside of Cape Town. We worked with Bradley Barnes and Kingdom Sports Ministry, which seeks to establish and build relationships with people through sports and connect whatever activity is being done to the Gospel.
Our first official day in Ocean View, our teams helped run a sports outreach camp that was organized by a local church. The sport of choice was a no brainer: futbol. We spend the morning doing a variety of drills and playing mini scrimmages, laughing, and sharing pieces of our own stories through plays, talks, and spoken word. It was a beautiful morning and an awesome start to our month ministry wise!
For the first week of ministry, we went to Simonstown School, an extremely ethnically diverse school, and did sports ministry with the kids there. We had the younger kids in grades 1-4 in the morning and the older kids in grade 4-8 in the afternoon. We ran stations, played big group games like futbol, sharks and minnows, big mama (or big booty as we call it in the States). We would incorporate different devotions into each activity and were able to share our own faiths both with the larger group but in smaller groups with kids we really connected with. It was amazing to see the depth of relationships that can be built through playing alongside one another. We would be joking around with the kids and then they would ask questions like “Why is God a ‘he’?” and “Does God actually love us?” They then would start sharing about their own lives and the brokenness that they faced at home or in their communities.
Due to Simonstown not being in session because it was their “spring break”, we switched it up and did a lot of ATL around Ocean View. ATL stands for Ask The Lord and essentially is a scavenger hunt with clues from God. Before we set out, we would pray and ask God to speak to us, whether that be through song, give us words, images, feelings, senses of direction etc. We would then come together as a group and shared what we got. Things ranged from seeing swing sets to the word “broad” to seeing a homeless man on the corner. We wrote down the list on a sticky note and then set out in smaller groups, following the Spirit’s promptings and talking with whoever we felt led to.
You may be sitting there thinking that this sounds crazy and it is because it actually works! Almost everything written on the sticky note was seen and acted on. Awesome conversations with people happened and powerful prayers were released. Because we were in Ocean View for the month, we would run into the people we met through out the week and were able to check back in on and further conversations. My ATL’s led me to have an incredible conversation with a woman named Fiona who was just blessed with an opportunity to open her own fish fry restaurant but was feeling exhausted and discouraged trying to bring her husband to Christ and it also led to the opportunity to track down to talk and pray with a family that a friend from Hope knew.
We also did ATL in Masi, which is a much more impoverished community right outside of Ocean View. Ocean View is a mostly coloured community and Masi is an African community, with people coming from all over to live in this slum. Ocean View and the surrounding towns have more job opportunities that other places so people move to Masi in hopes of being able to secure one. Masi is made up of small shacks and mainly unpaved roads and the poverty is clear.
While in Masi, we worked with a YWAM team who had just moved into Masi after completing their training in Kona. We had the opportunity to worship with them and then go out and do prayer walks/ATL with them as they began to understand the breakdown of the town. Masi was harder, because the poverty was much more obvious and we experienced more of a language barrier. One of the coolest things that happened in Masi was during worship one morning with the YWAMmers. One of the boys woke up with a severely infected toe – black and blue and very inflamed. Before we arrived, their team had been praying over it and it was starting to regain its normal color. By the end of our worship, the boy’s toe was completely back to normal and he was pain free. Our God is healer and does crazy awesome things!
One of our best ministry days actually happened on our “off day”. Some of us were interested in getting our nose/eyebrows pierced so we went off in search of a tattoo place that would be able to do it. We found one in Fish Hoek and because we didn’t have an appointment, we ended up spending most of the day there. We spent hours talking with the people there who were getting tattoos and by the end of the day, we were just as emotionally invested in the pieces that they were getting as they were. We heard stories about sudden deaths of loved ones, about the amazing blessing kids are, heard about lives that have been riddled with drugs, and received marriage advice. One of the people we met that afternoon ended up driving us home from Hillsong Church in Cape Town the next evening – so cool how God works!
It was a short month in South Africa (we were really only there for 2 ½ weeks) but it set the stage for the rest of the Race. Team Zeal quickly jumped in and stepped out in faith, trusting the promptings of the Lord. It was incredible to see the growth that each person made in just the few weeks we were there.
One of thought that I will leave you with – this month, Team Zeal worked through Psalm 23 line by line. One of the ideas that hit home and changed the way I see things was the line that reads, “my cup overflows”. One of my teammates so articulately pointed out that you don’t know what is inside each person’s cup until it is overflowing. God fills our cups and it is from the overflow and outpouring of love that Christ shows us that enables us to interact and love others. (I will probably expand on this later but until then, chew on that and go read Psalm 23 J ).
We leave for Swaziland in just a couple of hours where we will be in the bush with extremely limited wifi. Our whole squad will be together working at El Sheddai orphanage, mainly doing construction projects. I am so excited to see how God moves this month and will be eager to share stories with you all!
