Mozambique!

Little known fact about me: I heart cooking over fires. AND I'm pretty darn good at it, if I do say so myself.

One of the best days of the WR... spent a few days at this orphanage (the tents) with about 25 orphans... we handed out clothes and cooked. It was full of freezing, sleepy nights and sick kids but I had so much joy... unspeakable.

fun day - island trip with Cobus!

M-bique really is gorgeous! The cyclone messed up a lot but rebuilding is well underway.

Jaco family and home

Jesus film - Tim by the lake

The infamous Mozambiquan tree

and maybe similarly infamous Mozambiquan pest(milipede)

Fire with the kids at Pambara... they sang every night the same song... "We are happy to be together/We are happy to be together/We are happy, happy we are happy, happy we are happy to be together."

Our time in Mozambique was redeemed with what can literally only be called the hand of God. In town (we hitchhiked in eventually) we met a missionary man named Jaco. He must have caught a word from God that we needed help. My team soon moved in with his family (camping in his yard by a lake) and helping his family.

At first, my attitude was less than fabulous (obviously?).

I heard this Fiona Apple song that explains how my bitterness clouded my view -

"Because the fact being that/Whatever's in front of me is coloring my view/So I can't see what I see in fact/I only see what I'm looking through." ("Window")

But slowly, seeing Jaco, Maria and their precious kids Maggie and Rudo, I remembered why I'm doing this. THIS is missions. We cleaned their house and cooked their meals and watched their kids. We showed the Jesus film in a nearby neighborhood and people came to the Lord. We had church in their home. It was beautiful... and redemptive... and a little shaming. Shaming because I am so quick to forget that God is a redeemer. I am so quick to blame him or complain to him and so slow to trust him to bring me help and life.

I feel deeply the warning of Hebrews 3:12-14, "Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today', that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end."

I pray for greater endurance and less foolish despair.

"Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted" (Heb. 12:3); "Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has nomight he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and grow weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:28-31).