Surprise! Surprise! I’m moving to Mozambique!

One day in Guija, Mozambique I was
sitting in a broken chair hoping it wouldn’t collapse on me under the
only bit of shade on the property. Out of no where I thought of
asking the Lord what bit of scripture He thought I needed to hear
right now. What he gave me didn’t make sense at the time, but
certainly does right now. He gave me this passage from Hebrews:

Later that night I was worshiping God
under the ridiculously bright star lit sky when I felt God calling me
to sing a different song. This song was “Faithful to the end.”
Here’s a little excerpt from it:

He will come riding on the clouds with
justice in his heart and a sword upon his side. And all will see the
glory of this man. With fire in his eyes, He’s jealous for His bride.
He’s faithful to the end. He’s faithful to my heart. He’s faithful to
the end. He will come and marry me.

I really could not piece together what
all these “God is faithful” things meant. Well, I obviously knew
they meant that God is faithful, but why is God repeatedly showing me
that He is faithful?

Since December when I first went to the
orphanage, I’ve been trying to find what this one song is that I
heard on the car ride up. One part of the song would play through my
head and over and over, but I never knew where it came from. I would
be singing, “You make all things work together for my good.”
Just last week after hours of looking through my I-pod, searching the
internet, and asking people, I found the song!!! I do not think it is
a coincidence that God let me find this song now, when I needed to
hear it most. Here is an excerpt from it that I’ve been meditating on
the past two weeks:

You stay the same through the ages.
Your love never changes. There may be pain in the night but joy comes
in the morning. And when the oceans rage I don’t have to be afraid
because I know that You love me. Your love never fails. You make all
things work together for my good.

On our first day of debrief, I put all
the pieces together and realized what God was lovingly preparing my
heart for. During our first meeting with Jimmy, Kelly, and Becks, we
found out that my team and I are leaving South Africa and moving!
When I heard this, I kinda freaked out. I love South Africa, and
doesn’t God want me to be here? I was recently looking through things
that I wrote previously about how obvious it was that God wanted me
to be in South Africa, and now I am moving? My heart rate was
abnormally fast for the next hour. I didn’t have a normal heart beat
for a long time.

Why was this making me so nervous? Why
was I freaking out so badly? When I calmed down and got past the
almost hysterical, “I’m…leaving…South…Africa…?!” stage, I
was able to see God in this. I could think back to God showing me his
faithfulness and was immediately at ease, and excited!!!

I’m going to be honest here. For all
the people on my team, including myself, going on this trip has taken
a tremendous amount of faith. That seems like it would be an obvious
thing, but let me explain why. Not one person on my team originally
wanted to go to South Africa. We all wanted to go to Swaziland, or
Ireland. So finding that out that we were going to South Africa
instead of Swazi was difficult, but turned out to be exactly perfect
for us all! In the beginning of training camp and at the beginning of
our time in Mexico, we realized just how different our team was. We
were the smallest team out of all the teams, and we didn’t click
without much effort on each person’s part. We were so different from
each other. Some of us, however, had difficulty in trusting that all
5 of us were put together for a reason, and that that reason was not
because we were “leftover” Novas students who didn’t fit on any
of the other outreach locations. All five of us being together on a
team didn’t make much sense to us at that time. If we all went to the
same high school, the five of us would more than likely not be in the
same group of friends. We are still working on our team dynamics, but
I am happy to say that we have overcome all of which I just
mentioned. Something that I lived by in the beginning when I had
doubts about my team and going to South Africa was found in Romans:

Sometimes these things that God plans
for us aren’t always the easiest, they are not what we would plan for
ourselves. They include a lot of sacrifice and trust. It took all the
faith I had to trust God that He would use me in South Africa, when I
had wanted to go to Swaziland. When my team and I got to South Africa
it was an even greater step of faith because the ministry we were
going to be doing there was not at all what we had been expecting.
All of the ministry was great, and so were the people, but it was
just a shock because it is not what I was expecting. I can see now
how it was in God’s plans for us to come to South Africa, but in the
beginning I couldn’t see it. It was so easy, I’m ashamed to say, to
think that God made a mistake in where he sent us. Either that, or
His plans for us weren’t as good as he says they are.

During debrief, we received a lot of
prophesies. And don’t worry, prophesies are totally okay and not
scary, it’s just receiving words from God for someone or a group of
people. A girl on the Swazi team got this for my whole team:

That end part is what really got me.
“There is no wickedness in Him.” How true is that, but how far is
that from how I was feeling? God didn’t send us here so we could
fail. He has plans for us that are good, and not evil, plans to
prosper us and not to harm us. What was the hardest for me is that I
wasn’t seeing my team or I prospering as much as I had been hoping
for. We weren’t prospering, and it was partially our fault, and the
other fault doesn’t exist, because there is no way it could be
avoided. God had planned for us to go to Mozambique and prosper there
more than we could have ever imagined. During our period in South
Africa we felt stuck was just a dry season, but we are about to be
hydrated by God’s perfect grace, faithfulness, and love.

When some of my team members and I got
home from taking a trip into Swaziland yesterday, we were greeted by
Myles who said he got a call telling us what the deal was with where
we were going. We had expected to go to Zimbabwe, but Mozambique and
Malowi were choices as well. Zimbabwe fell through, but the contacts
in Mozambique replied the day that they were emailed about us coming
to serve with them. All of us instantly knew that Mozambique was
where the Lord wanted us. For me, I didn’t see Zimbabwe in my future.
I didn’t feel like that’s where God wanted us, or that it would work
out. I was hoping for Mozambique because I know how challenging that
country is, and I have come to love the people and have such a
compassion for them. There is so much spiritual warfare there, and
finally we are attuned to it, but that is what makes it most
difficult. 60% of people in Mozambique are part of witchcraft groups.
And in the bush, that percentage is significantly higher.

While in Mexico the Lord presented to
me that some sort of ministry in Mozambique lies in my future, and I
believe this is it. I have spent more time in Mozambique it seems
than I have spent in South Africa. My passport is more than half full
of Mozambican visas and will almost be full of them by the time I
leave Africa. I don’t know how to explain properly how I feel about
Mozambique. Hopefully you all can see where my heart is by reading my
blogs.

The most interesting, yet challenging,
part of going to Mozambique is that we received less than 20 hours
notice that we would be leaving. That means we have to buy 3 months
of food, buy tents, pack our lives up, talk to family and friends on
skype for potentially the last time before coming back to America,
and try to finish resting up from our last trip to Mozambique and
debrief. We had the choice to leave today, or to leave in a couple
hours. If we chose to leave today, we would have one reliable driver
the whole 15ish hour drive to central Mozambique. If we chose to
leave a couple days later, it would take well over a day, we would
potentially get robbed by being in koombies over night, and would
have to switch koombies dozens of times. It seemed a lot easier to
leave a couple days from now, because we could do all the things we
wanted to do, but that’s not what is happening.

At first I was feeling like I wanted to
wait a couple days to go because I had people I wanted to say goodbye
to. But that changed when we started to worship. God revealed his
plans for my team to me. God told Jenny that He told me what He wants
us to do. I was sitting there and just being silent, when God’s plans
became my plans. There really is no other way for me to describe it.
Some of what was going through my head was:

This is what we have been waiting for!
We have been waiting for God to make it clear where He wants us to go
and for the right doors to open. All the doors have been opened! They
not only opened, they were swung open!!! Us leaving almost
immediately after finding out is such an act of worship. We are
swallowing our desires of this world. We are tired, we don’t have
everything that we need to comfortably live in the bush for 3 months,
we haven’t said goodbye to anyone. But despite those things, God is
still calling us to do this. We are dying to ourselves by leaving
everything we’ve come to know and love in Africa to move to some bush
town in Mozambique with an Africaans man that I would swear has the
name of Yakkus and more than likely wears those disturbing African
booty shorts!

If anyone would come after me, he must
deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. -Mark 8:34

We say we want to be Jesus. We say we
want to be His disciples. Isn’t this what Jesus would do? Isn’t this
what His disciples did? Jesus would get up and go wherever his Father
wanted Him to go. His disciples would follow Him wherever he went.
This is like that. Jesus is leading us to Mozambique, and we are
following him there. We aren’t going to say to Jesus, “Can you hold
on a little bit? There are a couple things I wanted to do before I
follow you.” We are going to say, “Yes, Jesus! I will follow you
wherever you lead me.” That is what He wants from us. He wants us
to trust Him with our lives. He wants us to follow Him at any cost,
no matter what. Sometimes it is easy to follow Jesus, and sometimes
it’s hard, and sometimes there is something you really wanted to do
before following Him. That is part of dying to yourself. All of us as
Children of God need to work on this. Dying to ourselves isn’t
fun…that’s why it’s considered dying. You can only do this with
strength that God gives you. We need to acknowledge that we really
can’t do anything without God. It is by grace alone that we can do
what we do. There have been seasons in my life where there is no way
I could have gotten through life if Jesus hadn’t been carrying me the
whole way, and I have a feeling that Mozambique will be the same way.
It is such a humbling experience, and an even more amazing act of
love of our King for us.

I pray that this sparked some sort of
flame in your heart to die to yourself for someone who literally died
for you. It’s so much more than that, and I can only pray that you
can see the truth in this.

A teacher of the Law came to Jesus and
said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”

Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and
birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay
his head.”

Another disciple said to him, “Lord,
first let me go and bury my father.”

But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and
let the dead bury their own dead.”

-Matthew 8:19-22

P.S. I just got word that the Iris
Ministries staff from Mbonisweni is coming to the house I am staying
at for a meeting. Saying goodbye to these people was a reason that
some people wanted to stay in South Africa for a couple more days. We
had come to love these people, and we have spent lots of time with
them. This is another act of God’s faithfulness, and another window
opening! God is rewarding our faithfulness by bringing the people we
wanted so badly to say goodbye to to us! God is so good to us!