Habari! (Thant means hello how are you) So Africa has been both thrilling and challenging. We started actual ministry last Tuesday. So to start the day we wake up at 5:30 every morning to go and pray for an hour at the church. At first it was pretty hard to do this because I’m definitely not a morning person but it has turned out to be such a blessing. Starting the day off praying and praising the Lord has become such a precious time. Later in the day we play with the kids who go to school at the church and teach them Bible lessons and songs. It’s been interesting to see our relationship with them grow. In the beginning they were too hyper and excited to be with us mzungus that we couldn’t get much accomplished. But as they get used to us were able to work with them more effectively. Later on in the day we have been going to the hospital to pray for the sick. This is where we have seen God work in amazing ways! Many of us feel very broken after leaving because our hearts hurt for those suffering. The hospitals in Africa are very different from the U.S. They remind me of movies about the army. Each ward is really just a big room with about 100 beds. In the children’s ward many times there will be 2-4 children for each bed. While were in the hospital we talk to each of the patients and find out where they are with the Lord and what we can pray for beyond their illnesses. This has brought opportunity to witness to both the sick and their families. We pray for healing and it’s been wonderful to follow through and see that God is definitely working! We’ve seen so many people who looked as though they are on deaths bed walk out of the hospital healed the next day. I even got to lead one lady to the Lord 🙂 One day we were praying over this feeble elderly man. He asked us one request and that was to get him a Bible in his tribal language so he could really understand what he read. I was more than happy to do this and told him we would if we could find one! This proved to be a hard promise to keep. There are 42 tribal languages in Kenya and it’s not easy to find a Bible in any particular one. With the help of a translator we finally found one and I got to bring it to the man the next day. He was already feeling much better physically and thanked us greatly. He told us he had been asking the Lord to send him a Bible for a couple days and when he saw us walk towards him he prayed that the Lord would convict us to bring him a Bible. He told us it was not him or us but the Lord who brought him the Bible. 🙂 This made me very happy that I was able to be a vessel of the Lords work. I don’t know if any of you have read the book The Heavenly Man but this reminded me of when Pastor Yun asked for a bible and the Lord brought him one! Well, aside from hospital and school ministry, we have been helping build a stage for the crusades the church will be having. We played soccer with the street boys on Saturday and told them Bible stories and fed them lunch. Most of them were high off of glue which was pretty sad 🙁 On Sunday, David and Emma got to preach and some of us got to teach Sunday school!
All and all Busia has been pretty great so far! I have already learned three songs in Swahili 🙂
Well, I’m excited to see what this next week brings and thanks a bunch to all who are praying for us 🙂
