A new team. A new ministry. A new understanding of who I am. A stronger passion.
My new team of 6 other girls live in a house with 2 other teams. We live in a smaller village in Livingstone, Zambia. We are amazingly blessed with such a relaxing home to return to everyday. We have our hammock city and several of us choose to sleep in our tents every night under the african stars. We eat together and worship together! Every time we step out of our front gate we are greeted by the sweetest yet craziest children. The longer we are here the better we get to know them. We get to greet them with loving hugs and call them by name.
Who ever thought I would be a teacher???
My team heads out to Malota school in the morning. There we get to come along side the teachers, help kids in their simple handwriting and math skills and grade their notebooks. It is a very challenging ministry. There are so many kids to one small and beautiful classroom. It gets very hot, loud, and dusty inside those walls. But I get to sit next to kids (many who have dyslexia) and try to give them confidence and assurance. We have also been working on patients… and it is so excited finally getting to see the kids understand respond well to it.n
Bringing up princes and princesses.
Every afternoon we make our way to the soccer field! In the hot African afternoon some of the older kids and the ambitious squad mates play soccer while some just sit in the presence of these beautiful children. We talk about anything willing, starting from favorite color to family situations. We walk into the corn fields picking small white and purple flowers – then make well deserved crowns for our princess and princesses.
Simply Living
God has been showing me so much here. One of them being that I never want to get used to the gifts that God gives us. I want to stand breathless at every sunset, at every good smell that comes from the kitchen, under the stars, at the children that smile, at the strength of mothers I see on the street… the list goes on forever! God has given us eyes to see color and texture and depth. He has given us ears to hear music that is vibrant and rich. He gives us hearts to delight in what delights His.
In that light… God has also been showing me about freedom. God is so big! So good! So faithful! One part of freedom rest in the fact that when I chose Jesus, I chose to try and see the world they way he does. In that sense I can be set free from the things of this world that hinder or bind. I no longer have to hold on to comparison, judgment, jealousy, even exaggeration. I am free from those things! I get to live in the assurance of that comes from my creator. However, I am not perfect at this… I’m just not. I don’t want to replace freedom with perfection so we will let God’s grace be something beautiful we daily grasp.
Something my amazing sisters thought me a while back was to never settle for less – God has brought that lesson back to mind recently. He has been showing me how He has created so much beauty. It is like God has the perfect blend of colors to make the perfect masterpiece. But because of the sin in this world – it is like dipping the paint brush in really dirty water… it changes the original paint color just by the slightest. The perfect color that God had in mind is now changed just by the slightest… but it isn’t AS GOOD as it could have been. Are you picking up what I’m throwin’ down? Sometimes we let sin take away from that “perfect color” and take away from the complete beauty that our Creator had originally intended it to be. When I say I want to go big… I mean it. So why would I want to continue to live in a life that daily settles for less?
This is not sin, forgiveness, or grace in full – but rather
just a tiny little part to the big picture, I know that there is so
much more than just this … so just keep that in mind.
