Man, I really wish for once that I had the availability to all my pictures…o well, ya win some and ya lose some eh?
Last month we stayed with a couple named Jose and Naara. You can read a bit more about them from Lindsay by clicking here:
http://lindsayhoogendam.theworldrace.org/?filename=faith-like-rain . These two will be in stories of mine until I die…seriously. What a blessing, encouragement and what fun. Anyway, there was another family that lives with them on the property. Simon is the father of 4 beautiful (about to be 5) children. He is only a few years older than me. They literally have next to nothing and were living in a dump of a place. Tikvah was working on a little video to show a bit of what we were trying to do to help them so hopefully that comes out and I can link it for you. Regardless, this family pretty much eats cooked flour and water daily, was sleeping on cold cement each night and their clothes were fairly ragged…Yet, I haven’t come across a healthier, more thankful and joyful African family.
Healthy families and Africa don’t always mix but I tell you that these people were as genuine a family as I know. One of Simon’s children was a 7 or 8 yr old boy named Pompelo (which means pray) who was born deaf. Through prayer God is starting to open his ears and I assure you I will write more blogs about him. However, this blog isn’t about them so much as it is about their door…yup, their door.
Chris and I took apart their door to rebuild it and put it back in better condition. The outermost layer of this door was more like thin plyboard and was falling apart. So we ripped it off and jumped back at the sight of literally thousands of black ants moving around. It seriously looked as though the door was moving. Along with the ants we found honey…The guard ran over and promptly plunged his fingers into it to show us that it was good. So Chris and I along with much of the team spent the next little while enjoying the pure sweet honey found inside before cleaning out the ants and rebuilding the door since the ants had weakened it.
The night before our last Sunday in Monkey Bay God gave me two dreams to share with the church. One of them involved a piece of wood similar to the door with ants crawling out of it. The bible says that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Pretty much whatever is inside of you is going to come out. That’s just the way it works.
God has put honey inside of us…something pure and sweet and attractive that we can’t take credit for because we can’t produce it on our own…we can only attempt to be a home for it. However, there are times when we allow doubts, frustrations, anger, resentment, jealousy, deceit and unforgiveness to live inside of us…These things are like ants that will slowly eat us away, multiply when we aren’t looking and will weaken the foundation we’ve been given. The only way to be clean and pure of heart is to let Him rip open your heart, sweep out the ants, enjoy the honey and rebuild you better than you were before…When was the last time you looked into your heart and only found honey? Do you have ants?
