Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

| by archiveworldraceblogs

  I’m in Africa, I can’t even handle it. When I was praying about what my next step was going to be last summer the Lord started putting Africa on my heart, but never opened a door to go. I never thought I would get to be here. The Lord is good.

We left Belfast on the 31st and headed to Dublin for a 3 day worship conference with the rest of the world race squads out on the field. For three days after the conference we had our first squad debrief.  Squad debrief is a time to get together every 3 months and talk about what we’ve seen the Lord doing, worship and encourage, and reconnect as a family of believers. We ended our 3 month debrief in Dublin on the sixth and then flew to Nairobi, Kenya on the morning of the seventh. We stayed in a hostel for two days and then hopped on a bus, and 11 hours later arrived in Busia. Busia is a town about twenty minutes from the Kenya/Uganda border. My team and another team will be working with Pastor Gideon and his church and contacts for the next few weeks. So far we’ve been getting acclimated to the culture, exploring the town, grocery shopping (a half day excursion) and planning for ministry. Tomorrow we will start doing a little construction project for the church, and after that we’ll begin door to door evangelism. I’m not sure what that looks like in Kenya, but we shall see!

I’m excited and nervous about door to door ministry. I don’t want to walk in to desperate situations, give a watered down version of the gospel and then head home feeling good about my day, like I checked off some ministry requirement. I want fresh words for His people. I want to see the lonely, the broken, the sick, the unseen; and those finding false peace in idols, come to know that the Lord is good and that He sees them and loves them. I will for sure be praying about how to present the gospel, which is key, but I see that relying on the Holy Spirit to speak and trusting what I hear feels a lot riskier than a rehearsed presentation.

Busia is a colorful town. I’d say it’s a medium sized town, as far as towns in East Africa go…..which I know literally nothing about. There’s one main stretch of road and then tons of shops, stands, and tarp stores off to the side. There are back roads off of the main road leading to markets, schools, hospitals, homes and then rest of Busia that I haven’t seen yet.
 
I need to talk about my church experience on Sunday. My group went to a church a few minutes away from our house called Busia Corinda church. We had all prepared a little something to share and went in being told that we either would or would not be running the service. Once we sat down a woman asked us if one of us would be willing to “meet the children.” I, being one who loves children, said that I would love to go. To make a long story short, “meet the children” means teach a lesson and a song to a room of about 60 kids. I talked about how Jesus is like the wells here, always full of life for us, full of peace, full of joy, never-ending. We ran into a little bit of a problem when I asked the kids if their wells ever ran out of water, expecting the answer to be no (and then to bring it back to Jesus being living water.) However, their answer was yes, the wells do dry out. I may or may not have asked them to repeat that a few times and then rearranged my point to close with the word that Jesus always has enough, He never runs dry. Minor shift in the message.
More to come. This is my second attempt at blogging today. I wrote what I thought was a stellar blog and then the power cut off as i was finishing it. This is my second attempt.