July was the most amazing month…just as I was getting settled back with family and friends, I started missing the people I had come to love and do life with for so long!! I don’t know how I got so lucky, but God made a way for me to go back to Mukamba and visit one last time to say final good-byes and encourage the teachers and children in the strides they had made!!
I tagged along with the team from FBCW and boy was it a quick and miraculous trip!! I really didn’t know what to expect, except for God to show up in big ways. I think secretly I wanted to see that the preschool still needed me and that I just had to come back full time. No sooner than we had landed, I was reunited with the amazing family I had come to love over the past few years. We ventured out into the bush with so many hopes for the coming weeks.
Jako, of course, had a few projects up his sleeve and I had high hopes of spending ample time at the preschool with the teachers and children. The team divided and conquered the entire week. We cleared a field, dug a foundation, poured a foundation, cut fence poles, dug and planted fence poles, attached fence to the poles, ministered to the community through the eye glass ministry, taught Bible lessons, told stories, loved on the children at the orphanage, sang songs with the children at the school, laughed together, prayed together, and praised God the entire way!!!
On a trip like this, with this many servant hearts, you come to expect God to show up in big ways by allowing us to accomplish far more then we ever thought possible. For providing strength and endurance to finish what we started and to work through the pain and tiredness with our eyes fixed on His prize. God definitely showed up on this trip and every member of that team can testify to how powerful His Hand was at work among us and the community. Relationships were restored, faith was challenged, and grace was poured out!!
The thing that surprised me on this trip was the quiet working of the Holy Spirit. The first day we got into the bush it was a Saturday and no one was at the school. I snuck away to go check it out and see what the children had been working on and learning. I can remember it, like it as yesterday. I walked into the building, to the familiar smell of concrete floors and the beauty of children’s learning all around me. As I walked around the classroom, my eye filled with tears and the Holy Spirit gently told me, “They’ve got it.” I realized in that moment that the teachers didn’t need me anymore, that they were beyond capable and beyond confident in their abilities to love on these children and guide them in creating their educational and
And God saw where my heart was and He refused to let me leave on a sorrowful note. One of the last nights in the bush, I snuck up to the playground just a few meters away from where God fist gave me the vision for the preschool back in 2010. Almost to the day, three years later, He brings me back to the same place and reveals Himself to me in the same way. It was in a gentle breeze I heard the quiet whisper of a Father saying, “Don’t worry, I will take care of them, they are my children too.” I had so many questions, so many fears for those precious children who came to the school! For over two years I poured my heart out for them and came to love them as my own. That night God assured me that they would never be alone and would forever be in His care. He calmed my heart and my spirit to trust in His Sovereign plan, to trust in Him sending me back to America!!
“So it is when I declare something.
My word will go out and not return to Me empty,
But it will do what I wanted;
it will accomplish what I determined.”
Isaiah 55:11
So back to America I came to discover what God had next…
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