Malawi - once again

There is nothing like being shaken out of your reality by being dumped in someone else's reality. That is what going to Africa did for me. It made me realize there is much more to the world than i had really understood. It put all of the "blessings" we have in America in their place. When you go to a place where you are grateful to have the bare necessities in life and then find that with Christ there you can be content without all the vast number of things that fill our lives here in the states, it can be radically life changing and make you long for that. When you can walk the streets, open a Bible and share for an hour with a gathered crowd about Jesus and the Gospel, or look into the smiling faces of the orphan kids, or minister to the sick ones, when you find a place where one can actually be a blessing to others because it doesn't take much in worldly goods to reach hundreds of people, when you see the suffering and the darkness, the Muslims and their mosques, the witch doctors and their bondage, you begin to feel like Christ did: He looked at the crowds and had compassion on them. It says Jesus went everywhere doing good and preaching the gospel of the Kingdom. Jesus said at then end of his life, after he had demonstrated how to live to his disciples, after he had made them fishers of men, Go into all the world and preach the gospel, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. That is the great mission of the church, make disciples, preach the good news, baptize the converts. Show Christ to a lost and dying world who is in rebellion against God. What a privilege! The angels were not given this blessing, we were! We are in Christ's stead according to Paul and through us, Christ comes and preaches peace to those who are afar off.

Lord willing, I will be returning to a land I have grown to love, a land which speaks in a strange tongue, which has strange customs, a land where I stick out as radically different as one of the only white people in the area. Yet it is a land where the words of the Bible are so abundantly true, the gospel makes peace between those of different places and ethnicity. It brings together the Jew and the gentile as one man, to be framed together as the temple of God. There is nothing that shows the transforming work of the gospel, the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, than when those who outwardly look very different, who culturally are very different, yet who fall together as brothers in the love of Jesus Christ. What a picture of unity!

So brother's, pray for me and the Chichewa speaking people of Malawi if you think of us, pray for the spirit of God to be poured out on the ministry of the gospel, pray for love, purity, holiness, righteousness, unity, and great fruit. The only hope of Africa is Christianity, the only hope of America is Christianity, the only hope of the world is Christianity. So pray brothers, pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers for the word, laborers willing to die in this world for Christ that they and others might live in the next for Him.

Until next time, tionana!