On our way back to the island near the edge of Victoria Falls and the famous attraction site called Devil’s Pool is where I had a misstep that sent me going the wrong direction. We had to link hands to form a human chain to get through some areas of the river. Let me remind you there are currents and we are only about 300 feet away from the edge of the falls. I was the last one in this human chain and was trying to keep up when all of a sudden I slipped and lost my balance. I splashed into the river losing hold of the person in front of me. The current started taking me towards the edge of the falls. It seemed like I was floating for about 10 seconds before I was about 50 feet away. This is where they had two safety ropes strung parallel to the edge of the falls. I was able to grab onto one of them and pull myself to safety. At this point I was able to regain my composure and continue on the journey.
As many of you can probably tell by this point this is not exactly what happened at Victoria Falls, because I would have told the story much sooner. This is the spot where I did have a misstep though, sending my mentality in the wrong direction for about two weeks. So here is that part of the story. I was linked up to the human chain when I made a wrong step and my foot slid on the rocks where we were walking. At this point it slid into a sharp rock that made a tiny cut into the top of my one toe. It didn’t seem like much at the time and I had the mentality that I could take care of it myself and didn’t need to seek medical attention. As soon as we got back to the place we were staying for the month, I soaked it in hot salt water and applied antiseptic cream on it. I figured this would take care of it and I would be healed in a couple days. This was start of the downfall in my mentality for those couple weeks.
The accident occurred the day we were heading to a debrief for four days. I felt like this time would give it ample time to heal. The injury was okay for the first couple days until on the third day I noticed some puss was coming out. I still didn’t think I needed medical attention and took care of the wound myself again. After debrief we had two more days of travel to reach Lesotho our next country of ministry. During this time the wound was healing again and I figured everything would be okay. Once we arrived we found out that ministry included a lot of walking up and down the hillsides to speak with the shepherd boys. I didn’t want to let anyone know that I wasn’t capable of this so I bandaged it up and went out the first two days. This just irritated it even more and caused more of a problem. After these two days is where my mental state started to slide.
I spent the the next several days resting while the rest of the team went out to evangelize. My mentality for most of my life has been that if someone skips out on something when a group of people are doing an activity is that they are being selfish. This is what was going through my mind at the time; that I am selfish for skipping out on the ministry time. I had many hours to think about things like this as there was nothing else to do in this remote mountain village. For about five days my headspace was cluttered with negative thoughts about myself and just in a bad mentality. So I started to fill my time by reading The Screwtape Letters. This started the process of turning my perception around and breaking me out of the funk. The book showed me the ways the devil tries to drag us down. I also was able to pray for a long time as I sat back at the place while the others were out. There were also brothers in Christ that I was able to talk to about on this difficulty I was going through. Through all of these resources I was able to break out of the bad mindset and continue on a healthy road. Even though i still couldn’t participate in ministry as my toe was still healing.
During this time of difficulty I learned that we need to constantly be on guard in our lives. We need to find the resources that will keep us on the path to a healthy life spiritually. Some of these include knowing who God says we are, so that we can combat the lies the enemy puts in our heads. We also need to rely on God to take care of us and not try to do things on our own. One other thing is that we need to have a community of brothers and sisters in Christ to help guide and encourage us while we are on the journey.
