Please check out my teammate Jenifer Jones’ blog to see how our most adventurous travel day went!
I want to say welcome to India part two, but then I realized I’m still in Africa! Welcome to Tanzania for month nine fun! We are doing door to door evangalism again this month and preaching. We have only done ministry for two days so far due to our extensive travel time.
It is the first time that our ministry host has ever had a World Race team here, so things are starting out a little rough but it has been good trusting the Lord. Our contact speaks very little English so we are remembering our days in India and most of Asia where we slowed down our speech and talked in broken English in order to be understood. It makes for some comical conversations.
The house we are staying in is nice. The girls have one room and the guy’s another, with a huge open room where Ginelove decided to pitch her tent and Andrew and I can work out in.
We also have a western toilet this month, but I will hopefully be posting a blog to show how westerns were really meant to be used. We also have a bucket shower again this month and we are all starting to get to the point where we may have to take our buckets into actual showers.
They feed us really well this month. We have rice for lunch and dinner and chapati for dinner. We usually have either beans, meat (fish or beef) and a mix of greens for both meals. For breakfast we have tea, instant coffee and bread (with butter or peanut butter).
So far we have done door to door one time and preached in two services. Andrew, Jen and I got the opportunity to talk to 5 different ladies who were Muslims. There was a mother and a daughter who were Muslim, but the mother said she was allowing her daughter to be Christian if she wanted because she thought she had a demon in her. The daughter has been suffering with a sickness for quite some time now and they aren't sure what it is or what to do. I thought it was interesting that even though this mother is a Muslim she still could see that something about her religion was not lining up so she was going to let her daughter pursue different beliefs.
The daughter and the mother both came to the service we had in the afternoon and we were able to pray with the daughter. She is still sick and we urged the believers of the church to continue to pray with her. When we were leaving the Pastor told us that they both decided to accept Jesus as their Lord. The language barrier is difficult and confusing, but we are believing that this mother and daughter are followers now.
The first service we had I was able to preach out of the book of Joshua. When I was about to be finished I got this overwhelming feeling that I wanted to just sit down and not say another word, so I stopped and prayed. The Holy Spirit then gave me words to speak that had nothing to do with Joshua, or any other sermon I have preached thus far on the race. It was reassuring to know that what He wants said will be said whether I know the words before hand or not.
I want to leave you with the word the Lord shared with the church that evening out of Matthew 25, The Parable of the Ten Virgins. Urging you to meditate on and pray about this parable, because so often we glaze over the words when we hear about Jesus returning. We think yes, that is important and I am doing ok so I'm ready. Check your heart, as I am having to continually do and see if you really are taking time to cultivate your relationship with the Father. When that time comes, it's not going to be enough to say Lord I worked and did all of these things for You, and it's not going to be enough to say I lived a "good" life and didn't do many things wrong, it's not going to be enough to say well my husband, wife, mom or dad believed in You so that counts for me too right? Fill your flask with oil so that when the time comes you can enter into His gates with confidence knowing you did everything you could to get to know Him more and more!
