Howdy folks! I’m
alive and well… and incredibly blessed here in Malawi. We’re staying in a suburb outside Blantyre
and will be going out into the rural villages for 2-4 days at a time to hold
crusades this month. The people here are
some of the most friendly people you will ever meet and most of them (in the
cities, at least) speak English!
After an intense transcontinental bus ride from South
Africa, through Zimbabwe, Mozambique and into Malawi, we arrived here on the 4th
after over 60 hours of actual driving time.
Oh, there are stories… believe me…
Anyway, we got one good night of rest in Blantyre and headed
out for our first crusade the next morning about an hour away to a village
called Chilembwe. We were the first
white people that many of the kids had ever seen and might as well as have been
purple but we had an amazing time. Let
me just tell you, the sound of African worship songs being sung by children is
now one of my favorite things!
In the two days we were in Chilembwe, we helped to lead two
worship services for them and also walked door-to-door to pray for people
Sunday morning after a night in our tents.
I was the speaker for the service Saturday evening and ended up taking a
different approach. Instead of having a
pretty detailed script to follow while I spoke, I only made a couple pages of
one-liner ideas to let the Spirit guide me through. Each idea led to other ideas, stories and
illustrations and by the time I sat down, I was told over 50 minutes had passed
since I started.
Part of that was because the translation process to the
tribal language, Chichewa, takes a while since it’s one of those languages
where you say a phrase like, “You should honor what you believe with your
actions and your life,� and you get about 10 seconds of Chichewa. It’s like those foreign subtitled movies
where the character speaks for several seconds and the translation at the
bottom reads only, “Hello.�
Just as a heads up—I’m not going to be using Internet much
this month. Partly out of lack of convenience
but mostly out of choice. I’ll try to
get caught up at the end of the month with pictures and whatnot but in the
meantime, thank you to all of you who have continued to support me! You seriously don’t know how much it means to
me and I can’t wait to show my gratitude in a better way than just words!
I love you all!
Thanks for reading!
