week 1 Trusting God's Provision

8-17-12  

“ Learn to trust God’s provision” - Valencia

    What a crazy day.  We started by driving an hour to Buhleni to visit the preschoolers on their last day before summer break.  The community is working to register the preschool so that meant a trip in the car with the preschool teacher to the Headman to get permission.  Then we visited Victor’s family again to greet his wife and son.  There is lots of greeting that needs to happen in Swazi communities and it is no fast process.  Then we drove an hour and a half in the opposite direction to the market and bus rank (bus stop) in Siteki to meet with Valencia.  Valencia runs a Community Health Evangelism (CHE) project in Swaziland.  She works for free with several volunteers to train community health workers and to disciple them.  She has had outside funding until this year.  We had a lovely conversation and prayer time with Valencia and her office staff.  She said she has really learned what it means to rely on God’s provision this year. 

     I think this will be the year that I learn this lesson as well.  It has been pretty easy to rely on myself, as a nurse with a monthly paycheck going straight into direct deposit.  I haven’t had to struggle or worry about my financial security.  As I plan for a year without a job and need to think about budgeting and more Spartan living; I hope that I will learn to trust on God in a way that I haven’t had to before. 

   We still are unsure if we will bring the CHE training into section 19.  There are many barriers.  This is hardly even a community, it is more of a squatters camp.  There is lots of drunkenness and many folks are just focused on survival.  The physical layout of section 19 consists of several migrant housing buildings without toilets and a series of mud and stick shacks surrounded on all sides by sugarcane fields.  There is a shack in the center of the community that functions as a 24 hour bar where everything that can be fermented is turned into alcohol.  Yesterday some of the sugarcane fields were an inferno of flame and acrid smoke filled the air. Fire is necessary to harvest the cane.  The cane fields that surround section 19 will soon also be aflame.  Last year several shacks caught fire and people lost their lives.

     Many women want to focus on sewing, making money, understandably, and meeting basic survival needs rather than discipleship and health education offered by the CHE.  However, the community health evangelism may be a tool to help truly unify and empower this community.  We have a meeting with the leaders of section 19 next Wed to determine if they would want to pursue this training.  Prayers for this meeting would be coveted.

     After our meeting with Valencia, we drove to section 19 again today for the women’s biblestudy they hold every other week.  More than 20 women gathered to sing and hear scriptures and testimonies.  I completely enjoyed the call and response singing.  It is like listening to a gospel choir.  However,  the most meaningful thing for me was to watch the child with cerebral palsy laying on a floor on a blanket, constantly moving involuntarily and with muscles spasms but singing in this very clear voice “Thank you Jesus”  This little girl is very intelligent but her body does not work.  She is not able to do most things for herself or even control her own moments, but she is thanking Jesus and joyful in the midst of that.  It felt incredibly convicting.  Do I thank Jesus for my blessings in the midst of hard times or even in the midst of good times?  Do I trust God for his provision for me or believe in his goodness towards me?  I’m not always sure.  On the journey…