I knew the World Race would have quite a bit of downtime to hang out with Jesus and bond with squad mates. What I didn’t realize is that I have way more free time than I do ministry.
A typical day in my first month (Mozambique) looked like
? A 6am run and body weight workout
? Chores (I usually mopped the bathroom or hauled water) with my host, his team, and our teams,
? Breakfast with the teams and a devotional that was lead by one of my squad mates
? 3 of us would go grocery shopping with our host while the remaining 8 of us would go with an interpreter to walk around the village and pray for the sick and poor (Guija is an extremely poor part of Mozambique and every 1 in 4 people have HIV/AIDS)
From noon on in Guija we had free time. We had almost no electricity, no wifi, no stores, limited chairs, no shade, no board games, and we were living with 12 girls in a 6 person space. Guija is literally just mud, cattle, plants, creepy crawlers, high heat, and high humidity. The hottest it ever got was 122 degrees and the humidity was about 70%. There was no AC, there was no breeze, and everything was wet and moldy.
So for 5 hours a day all we could do was lay on the bug infested tile, soaked in misery and puddles of our dirt and sweat. (I eventually just started using my bare hands to kill bugs.)
Honestly, this was really hard for us. We wanted to go out and build things for people and watch a God let a blind woman see. But in Africa the heat keeps you immobile and your day revolves around cooking and cleaning.
Oh and everything you do takes time.
At home if I wanted to do laundry I would just throw my clothes in the machine. In Africa everything is hand washed and hung to dry. But you can’t leave your clothes out for too long or bugs will lay eggs in them. You want to mow the lawn? Here’s a machete. Oh. You want a shower. Go carry 40 pound buckets of water for an hour. You want chicken and rice after church? The pastor will have to cut the head off the chicken before service .
I felt like I wasn’t doing anything useful. Like I am here to spread the gospel yet I’m lying on the boiling hot ground struggling not to pass out. What am I even doing for Jesus?
And now I am in Swaziland and I am a little over halfway done with month 2 and I have been even less productive than I was in month 1! I have been here for 15 days and have done 2 days of organized ministry.
The thing God is teaching me is that spreading the gospel is not about results. I’ll give you an example. One day some of us dug 2 foot holes with metal poles. We had to break apart rock and it was really hot and we all had blisters (I had 7) and sore backs. In America we would have used jack hammers and gotten the holes dug super fast. But because we used the heavy metal poles, we all struggled together and laughed and sang and talked to each other in terrible southern accents.
There was so much joy in digging those holes and when we were done we were proud and humbled and our friendship had grown. By slowly chipping away at the Earth as a team we were able to focus on building up a community of brothers and sisters rather than just doing a job.
Similarly to “digging’ holes with Jethro, Billy, and Bertha”, my ministry could move a whole lot faster here. I would love to be busier. But God is physically and spiritually opening up the floodgates here in Swaziland and I am forced to learn to focus on the things NOT of the world (tasks) but the HEARTS of the people around me.
I am not here to fix a problem. God did not put me here to fix an impoverished community or to heal a bunch of sick people or even to make disciples. Those are simply just the fruits of what God has put many people, including myself, here to do… to love.
God put me here to serve the servants. My ministry is having a conversation with the western missionaries who live with the Swazis permanently. These missionaries hardly ever get to talk to a friend without having a cultural barrier. My ministry is holding hands with a child whose mom has AIDS and whose dad works in another country. My ministry is praying over a deaf woman and believing with all my heart God will heal her ears and he doesn’t. But I get to witness how her neighbors take care of her physical needs and I get to join her in prayer for our spiritual needs.
Ministry is being the hands and feet of Christ, not the magic wand. Jesus did not heal people immediately. The woman who bled for 12 years BLED FOR 12 YEARS. Jesus did not heal her until she was able to see Him. Whether it is a single person or an entire country, Jesus will not heal the needy until the needy sees him. And that does NOT mean until the needy sees Christianity. That solely means God will not heal the needy until they see who Jesus Is, which is Relationship and Love.
