Driving up to our ministry location for the month, all I knew is we were working for a local church and would be sleeping in tents.
Driving up to the gate, my expectations were once again blown away. Instead of a small run down building sitting on a small plot of land, we arrived to a very high-tech, up to date church sitting on about twenty acres here in White River, South Africa.
The church is called Manna. Our hosts are Pastor Lauren and her husband Andy, who manages the maintenance.
This month involves a lot of weeding, painting, organizing, and dancing.
You heard that right, dancing.
This month, part of our ministry is participating in the annual Christmas Eve Manna Church Christmas Play.
There is a time machine and they are traveling back in time to the birth of Jesus. Somewhere on their way back, they press the wrong button and they end up in Texas. That’s where we come in, performing the Hoedown Throwdown from the Hannah Montana movie. A blast from the past thats for sure.
In between perfecting our dance moves, getting thorns stuck in our hands while gardening, getting paint all over ourselves, and learning what it takes to be sound engineers by helping Andy take down and set up the stage, making sure all of the microphones and speakers work, this month has been really good.
For the first two weeks, all of the boys were in the middle of some Botswana desert. An area that had such little water that all of the wildlife left years ago. Why there were people living there, we still aren’t sure. But they rebuilt a roof for a church and made it back to us safely.
In the meantime, the girls have been having oh so sweet girl time. It’s quite unfortunate that the first thing people think when they hear thirty-two girls are living and doing life together every second of every day is one word. Drama.
But here I am to say that didn’t happen. Not even a little bit. Our boy free two weeks were more incredible and more life giving than I had ever imagined.
Here’s a little secret – I too wasn’t sure which way those two weeks would go. But it pleasantly proved me, and several others, completely wrong.
For two weeks, the women of y squad could walk in complete and utter freedom. We studied the word together, worshipped together, worked hard together, and had a lot of fun together. Along the way we encouraged each other and built each other up, allowing ourselves the chance to pour into each other, be vulnerable, and lift each other up.
God has been so good to us this month.
We may be living in tents, finding Cobras in the boys bathroom, getting swarmed by bugs, and eating more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than I have eaten in my entire pre-race life, but God continues to blow us away.
The African sunset is just like you would imagine, vibrant and extremely long lasting.
The heat may be in the hundreds but it sure is a reminder of home and that darn Texas heat.
The thunderstorms are more magnificent than any thunderstorms I have ever witnessed.
Christmas in Africa looks a lot different than it does back home but sometimes different is good. Sometimes different is really really good. This year is a whole lot of different.
And it is so so good.
I never thought one of my favorite parts of this month would be gardening, but the basketball sized, overgrown, might as well be a jungle of a garden became so much more. So much more in fact, that we deemed it the sacred garden.
The sacred garden taught us a plentitude of life lessons and reaffirmed lessons that we had already learned long ago. That things are what you make of them and perspective, whether positive or negative, spreads like wildfire.
When you garden, you have a lot of time to talk. About your life story, your family, and what God is teaching you. You also have a lot more time to think.
This month gardening, painting, dancing, and sound checking taught us that ministry isn’t just playing with children, leading worship, or preaching.
Ministry looks like making sure the sound works so that others can lead worship and the people in the back of the church will be able to hear it.
Ministry looks like gardening for days so that hundreds of children will get to eat a little extra.
Ministry looks like dancing a silly dance in a Christmas play so that the invited will hear the story of Jesus, quite possibly for the first time in their lives.
Ministry is everywhere. And this month was an incredible chance to learn once again that ministry comes in all shapes and sizes.
