This is what a few days of ministry in Mozambique may look like:
“For ministry the past couple days, we traveled to a remote
village and held a crusade. Billy Graham made the term “crusade” popular for outdoor evangelistic meetings. We stayed in the village for three nights and held meetings in the evenings. During the day we had a lot of downtime and I
had quite a bit of alone time. I wasn’t
in the best mood and was often bored; also I have not been personally connecting with the evangelism
ministry. Yet, God has me here for a
reason and I attempted to make the best of it and seek God in the midst of
it. On the final morning of the crusade, I woke up at 5 AM
to the sound of something like drumbeats.
I thought that maybe we were being attacked by the locals, but I really just wanted to go back to bed. After the ruckus became more raucous however, I
stepped out of my tent in the schoolhouse where we were staying to investigate the situation and saw three goats sticking their heads
through our door. Curious.
I went outside and there were goats everywhere. There were goats on the walkway, goats on top of the
wooden desks, goats attempting to climb on the metal frames that support the
speakers and goats on top of goats. What had gotten into these mischievous creatures? I
chased them off and went to the bathroom.
When I came back they had gathered outside our door again, so I chased
them off again. This was all very
strange. Felito, our contact for the month, had barely slept that
night and the goats weren’t helping. In
addition to this, Joshua had malaria, Anna contracted malaria as well and the
gate at the house fell on Isaachar while Felito was away. On the final evening, we set up a screen and watched the Jesus film. This drew quite a crowd. There were many drunks and small children,
not the best mix of companions. After the movie, we prayed for anyone who wanted prayer for any reason. Afterward we packed up and began the trek home in the dark.
The ride home was windy and cool. I sat in the back of the pickup with the rest of the team. The moon and stars were out and we sped down
the long dirt road from the village. Once again, as had happened on the way there, the
tailgate vibrated loose, but I left it because I really didn’t want to check it every
two minutes. We finally made it to paved roads
and pulled over at one point to add water to something, I’m assuming the engine was
overheating. Then we went on our way, when after a while we heard a terrible noise under the vehicle. We stopped sharply; I fell on my teammate Robin and
Christian fell on me. It turns out the
driveshaft had fallen off the vehicle. While we were stopped, we were walking and looking for the driveshaft on the side of the road. We finally found it and figured out how to
secure the loose joint below the vehicle, which was spinning and hitting the muffler. Then we began limping back home, driving quite slowly. We eventually got home at about three in the
morning. On top of all this, it was
Felito’s birthday! A bona-fide adventure
in missions!”
