After arriving at Midnight on the 13th, we had a rest day for the remainder of the day. The following day would soon become quite an adventurous one.
On the day of the 14th, my day specifically started out early! I woke up at 7:30 a.m. because I was going into town with Felito my ministry contact to run a few errands before we went to a village, and to make sure everything was taken care of before leaving. The ETA was 2:00 p.m. and we wouldn’t arrive until 11 p.m. that night.
Before I go more into that, let me give you a little background of why we were going to this village. The story starts like this…
Back in January of this month, Feltio was traveling with a previous World Race Team. As they were passing through a town, they came across a man who had back problems. After speaking with the man, the team and Felito began praying for healing over the man. Much to God’s awesomeness, the man was healed, he accepted Jesus, and he invited Felito to his village. Felito being slightly naïve in the moment assumed that the man’s village was nearby since the man had back problems and probably couldn’t travel that far. Boy was Felito wrong!!! He soon found out the man’s village was three hours away upon arrival. Once getting there, the man told everyone about what had happened and almost everyone in the village gave their lives to Christ!
In saying that, we headed to this same village and their church there for quite an interesting night. After traveling in the back of a truck for what seemed like an eternity (5-6 hours maybe), we found ourselves slightly lost. You see, out in the “bush” there are many trees and the roads/paths are very sandy. There are also many side roads in the “bush” and if you don’t know where exactly to go, you can get lost very easily. That my friend is exactly what happened to us! After being lost for 30 minutes or so, we were finally greeted by people running to meet us in the dark. Joining us in the back of our flat bed truck, they began singing and rejoicing about the Lord. WOW!!! How beautiful are the words and voices that came from those people!!!
Upon our arrival to the village and their church at 11 p.m. or so, and after four hours plus of these people waiting for us, they greeted us with hugs and kisses, and more songs of rejoicing!!!
They sang for a little bit, we prayed, played with kids, then went to bed for the remainder of the night.
In as few words as possible, our 1 day trip turned into a 4 day 5 night adventure and God completely blew me away by these peoples faith and trust in the Lord. Little did we know, they had worked together farming someone’s land for maybe 2 or 3 days to gather up money to purchase a goat and all the food that we would need in the days to come. Also by the showing of their faith, they even gave up their once witchcraft idle and publicly burned them to prove their faith in Jesus. To freely give up something these people had known for much of their lives to follow Jesus truly shows their faith and that Christ had truly changed their lives.
Did I mention that the church there started only about 2 months ago? Yeah, only about two months ago did this church start and to see how much they’ve grown in their faith in such a short amount of time is truly astounding!
Needless to say, the time came for us to head back to Felito’s house. As we left, the people sang for us and gave us many gifts of coconuts, oranges, and nectarines and ultimately ended our time there at a high climax, and us all feeling highly blessed!
To finish this little adventure and on our way back, our truck’s disc for the clutch went out, we pushed it for almost 3 hours until we stopped and finally got it fixed again, we then headed back to the “bush” for 2 more nights, we moved Felito’s belongings out of his rent house, and then FINALLY we came back to his house here in Maputo. For the next 3 days, we did Crusades and prayed for people (I helped lead worship), then Sunday we had church where JohnFrank preached, Monday and Tuesday we had off, Wednesday we had ministry where we prayed for people, and today (Thursday the 24th) and the rest of the week we will have more Crusades.
So in saying all that, we’ve had a very busy and exciting first 2 weeks of ministry while here in Mozambique. As far as some of the things you can be praying for, please pray for:
-Funding; I need $2,300 more by July 1st to be fully funded or I will come home
-Strength, crusades are extremely exhausting
-Patience; it’s sometimes hard to deal with people after long days of hard work and little rest,
And please pray for anything else that you can think of in between!
Thank you so much again for all of your prayers and encouragement, and I will try to post again as soon as possible which I’m not sure will be because of the scarceness and limitability of Internet here. Love you all and Blessings!!!
