South Africa!

Welcome to my first few days in Heidelberg, South Africa!

We’re staying in a place within view of the church, our main ministry! We have a common kitchen, laundry, and shower area. For personal space, there are 10 college dorm style bedrooms. Fortunately, there were no arguments over who would get the one person rooms, since 5 people exactly (including me) volunteered!

Let me give you some background on the church. It was founded in 2003 by Phil and Tanya Smythe, 2 amazing people who let the Lord lead them in all things. It attracted many people to the area, but these people brought their personal baggage, and in 2012 the church was going downhill.

Now, most people would have thrown out all the troublemakers, but Phil took it to the Lord, and heard God tell him to leave, while He sorted out things here.

Phil left to Montenegro, a country in Europe, for the next 5 years, during which he distributed Bibles and preached the good news, even though it was illegal! His hope was to get kicked out so he could come home. During this time, the World Race found him, and started sending him teams.

While he was gone, the church went downhill, but when he came back in 2017, it started growing again. He described it like kids who go off to University, think they know everything, then come back and start trying to boss their parents around. The parents have two choices then. Kick them out, or take a vacation while the kids learn some things their own way. When the parents come back, the kids are ready to hand back control, because they’ve learned they’re not as mature as they thought they were. That’s the journey the church took.

Between where we’re staying and the church is the school. We haven’t seen much of how the school functions, because the kids are all out on holiday now, but it sounds like it’s going to be a blast to organize games for the kids.

Which leads me to our ministry! There are a few organized things we’ll be helping out with (cleaning the church and helping with fundraising run on Saturdays), but for the most part, it’s very much so ATL!

We can organize worship nights for the community, walk around town and make friends, or come up with games for the kids at school. The possibilities are endless! If we want to help with the church services, we can do that too!

For the last few days, we’ve helped clean the church for Christmas, prepared 3 songs and a skit for the Christmas service, and wandered around the town in an effort to figure out what our life is going to look like for the next month.

The town is really small, and not too busy (likely because of the holiday season). It has everything we need, from outlet converters, to ice cream, to pots and ingredients for making Christmas dinner! (I’ll write a post on Christmas once it actually happens😆).

The people here are so kind, and almost everyone speaks English, which is strangely a bigger culture shock for us than going to Guatemala and having everyone speak Spanish. It’s also kind of funny how many people have complimented our accents! The people here are very polite, but they’re not afraid of confrontation, or speaking their minds, something that’s left us laughing so hard on so many occasions.

Things we need prayer for:

A lot of people have started to become homesick, which isn’t very surprising for this time of year. And while we’re loving the special time we’re getting with Doves (and they’re loving the time they get with us), it has been hard not having everyone else here, and I’ve personally been struggling with dwelling on who’s not here.

Please be praying that we can be present and enjoy this unique experience with one another.

And don’t be alarmed if I’m not answering your texts! I’m just struggling to find good, consistent Wifi😆