Final Thoughts

Well, at least until I get home again on Sunday night. Today was a good day. I spent the morning gathering my questions for Pastor Ron about the rally we did with him last year (about cost, advertising, finding a location, yada yada...) and working a little bit more on the short message ideas that I will be sharing in the youth settings that he has prepared for us. After spending the morning doing that, I ran out after lunch to get all of the last minute things that I will need over this coming week. Things like toothpaste and batteries for my alarm clock, you know, boring stuff. After that, Brian and I had a meeting with Mpho, the pastor of the Soweto Vineyard Church whose camp I will be attending this week. We talked with him for a while about how we could partner with thier church and he gave us some really valuable information on how we go about getting the status of a Non-Profit Orginization here in South Africa. He used to work in government and still has many friends there, so he knows the system in and out. That information was incredibly helpful and I think he saved us a ton of time with some of his tips. From there, we headed home and learned that one of the members of the Spring Arbor team went to the doctor today and was diagnosed with an upper respiratory infection and another one was feeling sick, too. This obviously calls into question whether or not we will get a chance to leave tomorrow at 8 for a long three day trip. I've notified Pastor Ron that we will be playing it by ear tomorrow, but we may not be able to leave until Thursday. I hate having to do that at the last minute, but that's really the only option. If half of the team is sick, it's just not smart to go. I'll keep you posted, but if you don't hear anything from me tomorrow, then we left and you'll get the condensed version of my week on Sunday. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from my blog from my initial experience in Dundee last August:

...we headed to the location of the “Reach 4 Life” program kickoff with Pastor Ron's church. This program was designed to encourage young men and women to practice sexual purity and talks about how to overcome the overwhelming pandemic of HIV and AIDS that is destroying the country. The program is essentially a "read through the Bible program" with verses highlighted that have to do with temptation and that can be related to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
We drove to a field with a tent and a volleyball net set up in the middle of it with about 100 people milling about. We climbed out of the van and we were immediately told that there were people waiting for us to play volleyball with them. Everybody was extremely excited to get a chance to play volleyball against "the American team." There were only six of us on the team who were really excited (read, willing) to play volleyball, so the other three people played with the kids and talked with the people there at the kickoff. After a few games (we won all of them) Pastor Ron called us all over for the official kickoff of the program. We sang some songs, prayed, and praised God for this event and giving safety to everyone who had traveled to it. After this portion of the program, Michael Berens and I gave a fifteen minute challenge to those in attendance. Reach 4 Life is a program designed to encourage youth and young adults to practice abstinence and make wise decisions with their lives, especially concerning the issue of HIV and AIDS.
After the challenge time, it was right back to volleyball. These games went well, but we played volleyball from 12:30 until around 4:00 with maybe a half hour break for lunch. I enjoyed playing volleyball, but I kind of felt like we were just messing around while we could have been using these three and a half hours to minister and interact with people. This theory was proved to be incredibly wrong immediately when we stopped playing. Right as we stopped, a 22 year old young man named Xenepaie (spelling?) came up to me and started to tell me about his life. Xenepaie told me that his name translates “Blessing from the Lord” and that could not have been more accurate. He told me that he had been living a life filled with alcohol, drugs, and women. He was chasing after what he thought would make him happy, but he only found emptiness. He told me that he felt God tugging on his heart and that about three months ago he began attending church. He told me about the life change that God had worked in him and he never stopped smiling the whole fifteen minutes that we talked. He said that he was so encouraged that our team had sacrificed money and time to come to South Africa because we cared about HIM enough to do that. He was pumped about what God had done in his life and he was looking forward to what God was going to continue to do.
After my conversation with Xenepaie, I started to walk to the van because almost the whole rest of the team was ready to go. On my way to the van, I was stopped by a guy named Páni who we had played volleyball with for most of the time. I had assumed that he was a believer, but as we got into the conversation, it became clear that he was not. He talked about spiritual things, but he talked about the fact that he believed there was not God up in heaven, but each one of us were partly gods. Paul Hontz and I told him that Chirst had come as a man and He was God, but that nobody on earth was a god. We challenged him to read the Bible that we had passed out at the program and he said that he would. He said he would probably have questions, so we told him to speak to Pastor Ron about it.
These two conversations convinced me that the endless hours of volleyball had not been in vain. Actually, Jason reminded me that if we had flown the whole way to South Africa to have only those two conversations and encourage two young men to follow after Jesus Christ, then the entire trip was worth it. I walked away from the program kickoff quite encouraged and amazed at the way that our God works.