Mozambique has been an interesting month to say the least. It has been full of new experiences, personal growth, and new realizations as well as some old realizations brought into new light.
This month has been the most different from home that I have experienced so far. My team lived in tents in front of our contact’s home, we got water from a community water spout, cooked on a coal burner, took bucket showers, used the tallest squatty potty I’ve ever seen, listened to the local witch doctor beat a drum all night every night without fail, and been to some of the most fun church services ever. It was different from home, but our contact treated us like family and welcomed us in to do life with him every day. Every morning, the local kids in the village would wake us up by peeking into our tents and giggling until we said “Bon Dia” and got up. After that, we would get up and do devotions as a team and then begin our daily ministry of visiting widows in the area of our village, going to “The Land” where our contact is building an orphanage, or go to a church service. We shopped at an open-air market everyday for our food and cooked for 19 people on a single burner. It was a totally new experience for me, but I am so glad that I had it. It taught me a lot about how little of what I have I actually need. I don’t need to have a closet full of clothes, I don’t need to have a car, I don’t need a refrigerator, running water, a flushing toilet, in short, I could probably make do with about 5% of what I actually have.
Before being on the Race, I would feel so much passion about giving people everything that I had available to me. When I would see those late night commercials about sponsoring a child in a foreign country or providing things for those less fortunate I would feel sorry for them because they didn’t have the best of the best, but I’m learning that more stuff isn’t the answer. I’m not saying we shouldn’t sponsor kids or donate money to help people to have the things they need, but what I am saying is that they don’t need exactly what I have. Here in Manga, Mozambique, I have seen people more in tune with the spiritual needs of their community, living with more faith than I’ve ever dreamed of, and just doing life as Jesus called us to do it. This awesome community isn’t bogged down by so many material things or politics of the church, or trying to make their life look pretty from the outside. They live life raw and they do it well. They love people just because they’re there, they take care of each other because they want to, the share in the small things because they can. For example, we were going to have to leave our ministry site early because of some theft and safety issues, but our church family, whom we have only known for 2 weeks, took it upon themselves to find us an apartment to stay in for the last week of our month so that we could stay and do life with them because they care about us. It just blows my mind how well and how much they love people.
In the United States, I very rarely, if ever, see people just stop and take care of others because they want to. They’re usually too busy trying to take care of their own life and don’t have the time to think of anyone else’s needs in the ways that I have seen here. Our contact, Elijah, has given up everything to live a life of faith and follow what the Lord has told all of us to do. It is his mission to take care of the orphans and the widows and he does exactly that every day. He goes around to different widows in his community and prays for them and worships with them and just loves on them so that they know someone cares for them. He’s spent all his money on buying land to build an orphanage to house kids in need because that’s what the Lord told him to do. He lives by faith. That’s it. He doesn’t have financial backers there to pay for his ministry, he doesn’t have a staff of people supporting him, he doesn’t have an office that he works from. He just simply lives his life the way God has called his people to do it and it just goes to show that you don’t need a ton of “stuff” to live a life worthy of the Lord. You don’t have to have everything perfectly set up in order to do something for God. You can just live your life and that’s your ministry.
