Do you ever wonder how many steps you take in a life time? It’s probably too many to count, but, on Monday (September 25th) I had an interesting God thought. Some steps seem more important than others. Taking your first steps as a child, walking across the stage to graduate, walking down the isle at your wedding, and hopping off a plane in a brand new country. All of these steps have meaning. They signify that you’re starting a new chapter of life. All of those things are important and amazing things! However, what if we made every step important?
As I’ve been in Nsoko I’ve realized the importance of each and every step I’ve taken. With every step, I leave a little bit of God. When I take my steps to ministry, prayer walks around the Anchor Center, and a hike up a mountain that’s close by, I leave the light of the Lord!
Our ministry is around a half a mile walk away. It is called Mbutfu (pronounced Mm-boo-tu) care point. Even though it’s open from Tuesday to Friday, we don’t technically get Mondays off. On Monday we do ATL (No, not Atlanta. It stands for “Ask The Lord.) and after sitting in God’s presence for a while He gave me that God thought I wrote about above. He also gave me a message to give to someone.
“I want you to walk instep with Me. When things get hard and the sand pulls at your feet don’t say, “I’m fine Jesus, I’ve got this.” Because you don’t. Let Me lift you up and carry you through. I love you my child and I know you think you can handle everything but I’m here for you.”
While I was writing that down, I got an image in my head. I envisioned either myself or someone else walking on a beach with Jesus. Suddenly the person’s feet start to sink into the sand, sinking deeper with every step. They couldn’t get out no matter how hard they struggled. It was only when they stopped struggling completely, standing stock still, did the sand stop pulling at them. Jesus then leans down, picking them up with ease, and carries them down the beach. I shared this with my team but I felt the message was really for Christy and Lissie. When I told them about it they both said that walking in step with God was exactly what they were feeling during the ATL! It was an amazing moment for all of us.
Because of what I got during my ATL, (walking with Jesus) I decided to take a prayer walk around the Anchor Center with my leader Kristen. As we walked, we decided to pick up some trash along the way. It wasn’t long before a young girl, maybe 7 years old came running over. At first I thought she was just looking to come play, which I was totally fine with, but instead of asking to be picked up, she bends down and starts picking up trash with us. I was so proud of this child who came over to two missionaries just to help us pick up trash. When we had finished picking up as much trash as we could, we started walking back to the Anchor Center building. We asked her what she liked to pray about and she answered, “I like to pray, “Jesus, I love you!” It made me smile. This child, who probably only eats one meal a day, doesn’t ask for food or material things. She just praises the Most High when she prays. I can see why God asks us to have a childlike faith. She has no doubt in her mind that Jesus will provide and protect her, she just tells Him how much she loves Him.
Ministry for our team is absolutely amazing! Each team has a different care point they work at and for ours we get to work with children and teens! We don’t start ministry until around 10:30-11 so in the morning my team and I get time to read our bibles and sit in God’s presence. Our shepherd, Mzwandile, comes to pick us up and we walk the 10 ish minutes to our care point. When the children see us coming they all get up and start running to us. They’re so adorable! They range in age from 1 to 6 year olds and we get to play, sit, and dance with them for about an hour before we take lunch. Once we take lunch, we clean up our food and prep the room for the primary schoolers. They range in age from 7 to around 14 and we have 35-40 of them join our class for a lesson. Sometimes our shepherd asks us to sing a song and share a verse that’s on our hearts. After that’s done, Mzwandile, shares the lesson for around an hour, speaking mostly in Saswati (The native language to Swaziland.). When he’s finished, one of my team mates prays for everyone, then the kids get a bowl of food and are sent home. On Fridays, we work with high schoolers. This presents a new ease to communication, since the school system in Swaziland makes it mandatory to learn English to pass into your next grade. A lot of them can hold good conversations with you about their life at home and school.
Now that I’ve given you a glimpse into what our ministry looks like, there’s a story of an adventure my team (except Lissie, who was sick. She’s better now.), plus two other squamates, and I embarked on. This is the story of how I illegally crossed the boarder into South Africa and celebrated a tribal heritage day. The day started out normally. Breakfast was served and most of our squad was going to Steven’s, our ministry host, home. However, a young high school student, who goes by the name of Paulette, had offered my team and a select few other people to join her in hiking a nearby mountain to see her Godmother. We were excused from going to Steven’s, and at 9 a.m. we were off to the mountain.
None of us really knew what we were getting ourselves in to and after an hour of walking we hit the base of the mountain. We took the chance to rest for a moment and asked Paulette how long it would take to hike the mountain. “Two to three hours depending on how fast we hike.” We all glanced around at each other. This was going to be interesting.
The only difficult thing was the hike itself. I’d put it at a level between intermediate and hard. There was a lot of loose rock and sediment due to the fact that the path wasn’t used very often and there was also a few steep areas to it. But the view at the top was absolutely worth the whole hike. The hike itself was beautiful. We rose to an elevation of around 2,000 ft. (Thanks to my watch for giving me the altitude) At the top you could see everything, even our little Anchor Center! There was a whole community at the top of this mountain! It turned out that the top was actually in South Africa…and there was no boarder patrol who saw us cross. Well! When in Africa!
We arrived at Paulette’s godmothers house but she wasn’t home. So we unpacked our lunch and ate our sandwiches by her house. Paulette asked some of her godmother’s neighbors if they knew where we could find her. They told her that she was at a celebration just past the local school. We packed up our lunches and set off. When we got past the school there was a stretch of road we walked down before we saw it. The celebration. It was amazing! There was this huge area that had a circular fence made of giant branches! It was probably 10 feet tall and could fit a house inside that’s how big the diameter was! Inside this fence were people dancing and performing. We found out from Paulette’s godmother (who we did find, if that didn’t occur to you) that this celebration was for this tribe’s chief and his wife and that this celebration only happens once a year! How lucky we were! They welcomed us with open arms and gave us sticks (only ones found on the ground, not terribly special. It’s special to me though!) that they would use to slap their palms to a beat. When they had finished the dance they wanted us to stay longer but we had to start down the mountain, lest we get caught in the dark going down. They did let us get going but not before they got a picture with us and sent us off with food. They gave us some kind of roast beef, pumpkin mash, coleslaw, and something called samp. It was so good! We made it down the mountain in about the same time it took to climb so by the time we got home everyone was exhausted but ecstatic about what we got to experience!
Everything in Swaziland has been so amazing, it even rained a ton yesterday, which is such a blessing since this country is in a massive drought. Continue to pray for rain for Swazi even after we leave. A prayer request for myself, I have been feeling exhausted and I had a weightlessness moment the other day that scared me quite a bit (Kind of like a dizzy spell for those of you who don’t know the back story behind the word “weightlessness”) So if you could pray for me in that way I would be exceptionally grateful. Thank you all for following my blog and supporting me through this! You all are honestly amazing! I’ll try to post pictures to my blog when I get better wifi (which will probably be in Oct. at some point.)
Love you all!! God bless you and keep you!
