William Booth’s last speech to the Salvation Army ended with this: “While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight. While little children go hungry, as they do now, I’ll fight. While men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight. While there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight – I’ll fight to the very end!”
Greetings!
The above and below are a few of the stories I shared in this talk from the New Wine National Leaders Convention, just before lockdown kicked in. Seems like a long time ago now. There’s lots of juicy material in there, worth a listen!
Amy Carmichael was someone who knew the meaning of suffering, and yet continued in sacrificial service, for many years rescuing young girls from temple prostitution in Hindu temples in India. She spent her last two decades mostly bed-ridden, using the time to write at least 35 books of meditations and reflections. When she died, in accordance with her wishes, no headstone was erected. Instead, the thousands of girls she had rescued placed a bird bath over her grave, inscribed with the word Amma which means ‘Mother’ in Tamil.
This is the poem she wrote about the suffering involved in being obedient to the gospel call.
Have you no scar? No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand? I hear you sung as mighty in the land; I hear them hail your bright, ascendant star. Have you no scar? Have you no wound? Yet I was wounded by the archers; spent, Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned. Have you no wound? No wound? No scar? Yet, as the Master shall the servant be, And piercèd are the feet that follow Me. But yours are whole; can he have followed far Who has no wound or scar?
She said: “We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don’t wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.”
A certain mission society in South Africa once wrote to David Livingstone, “Have you found a good road to where you are? If so, we want to send other men to join you.”
Livingstone replied, “If you have men who will come only if they know there is a good road, I don’t want them.”
He later wrote in his journal on one occasion concerning his “selfless” life:
“People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice, which is simply paying back a small part of the great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice, which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind and a bright hope of glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege.”
A vicar was too busy to help a desperate homeless lady needing help. He fobbed her off with a promise to pray for her. She wrote the following poem and gave it to a local Shelter officer:
I was hungry, And you formed a humanities group to discuss my hunger. I was imprisoned, And you crept off quietly to your chapel and prayed for my release. I was naked, And in your mind you debated the morality of my appearance. I was sick, And you knelt and thanked God for your health. I was homeless, And you preached a sermon on the spiritual shelter of the love of God. I was lonely, And you left me alone to pray for me. You seem so holy, so close to God But I am still very hungry – and lonely – and cold.
We sympathise with the vicar. The challenge is, we are all so very busy. Is it the right kind of busyness…? Have you had a similar experience?
Greetings folks!
The above and below are some of the notes from the questions I wrote up for discussion in home-groups this week, having shared the message yesterday at my local church, Holy Trinity Combe Down.
A little fellow in the ghetto was teased by one of the older street kids who said, “If God loves you, why doesn’t he take care of you? Why doesn’t God tell someone to bring you shoes and a warm coat and better food?” The little lad thought for a moment then with tears starting in his eyes, said, “I guess He does tell somebody, but somebody forgets…”
Let’s not be that person who forgets…
“I was talking to a friend who runs a national youth ministry. He told me about the Scouts in this country. They have a waiting list of over 50,000 kids, which puts paid to the lie that kids don’t want to go to a youth group. Many really do want to. They simply can’t. Why? Because there aren’t enough adults volunteering anymore. Where are they? They’re at home in their living rooms bowing down at the altar of Netflix (or Amazon Prime, etc).”
Discuss.
How would you answer the question: What did you do during lockdown? And, what did you learn during lockdown? And what new habits would you like to take out of lockdown moving forwards?
Evening options instead of just vegging in front of the TV watching lame programs (still on the TV though!):
Or how about Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage, we really enjoyed this:
Do sign up for praying for Muslims during Ramadhan – prayercast.com They send you a daily 4-min beautiful prayer video.
Ed Walker’s book A House Built on Love is well worth reading. Could any life-group get excited about coming alongside ex-cons/sexually-trafficked ladies/those wrestling with addictions etc in the context of buying a house and loving these precious wounded people to life? Hope into Action have seen stunning fruit, and as a full-on Christian organisation have repeatedly won secular industry awards for their approach. The social capital and potential of the Church is unparalleled in addressing such needs.
In Rocky 3, there’s a scene where he’s going soft, getting cultured. He’s achieved boxing fame, and he loses his fighting fire. Manager Mickey says to him: “The worst thing happened that could happen to any fighter – you got civilized.” I wonder if that is exactly what Jesus would say to us. You got civilized…
Have you been ‘civilised’? Is it wrong to be ‘civilised’? What is the point Simon was making? Do you agree or disagree, and why?
Yesterday we joined GLO’s newest partner UCE for an outreach event in the bush at a place called Bugendana. It was wild!
These guys have been running for a decade on a shoestring budget without any external support, relying on their own sacrificial contributions. Recently we committed to backing them, as their track record was so impressive. On this visit, I really wanted to see them in action, and I wasn’t disappointed. I’m out with a friend Jon, and he was likewise beautifully blown away. Not least because this lady came up to us after the main meeting, having testified on the stage with her husband in front of the big crowd, and said the following:
“I had a dream three nights ago of two white men coming to see me (there are no white men in this area far from the nearest city). It was lashing with rain and the mud walls of my house caved in on me, partially trapping my leg. I could see the sky above, and it was exactly like it is now. Then you arrived this afternoon, and when I saw you, I recognised you from my dream. I know God is speaking to me, and I’ve now decided to give up witchcraft and drink, which have been ruining my life. I’m surrendering my life to God, and with His help, I will manage it!”
How about that?!
I shared with the crowd, and a few dozen came forward for a first-time response. Then the sick were called forward to be prayed for, and all sorts of healings took place. Each in turn came to the microphone with stories of what had just happened. “I’ve been on crutches but now I don’t need them.” “I’ve had stomach issues for three years and they are now gone.” One lady was whooping with delight as she jumped up and down and declared herself fully healed from crippling back pain. A young man had been brought to the meeting straight from school by friends on a bicycle because he couldn’t walk on his own, and his face was radiant as he spoke of his complete healing.
As Jon said: “A cynic would say that they have been prepared in advance and lined up to give false testimony, but no way, those were genuine stories. Wow, I’ve never seen anything like it!”
Time ran out so we couldn’t hear all those who wanted to share, and then the dancing started, and it was beautiful unrestrained joy. Here’s a sample!
TED/MAP talk in North Carolina at New Wineskins Conference
Hello, my name is
Simon Guillebaud. I’ve recently completed 20 years working in Burundi, a
conflict zone in Central Africa, and one of the most beautiful but broken
countries on the planet. That’ll do on introduction, time is short. This
TED/MAP talk is just 15 minutes to share my top ten lessons from two decades of
cross-cultural work – isn’t that an impossible task? I’ll try.
So I’m picturing
Paul in his cell in Rome, and he’s about to be led away to have his head
chopped off (he probably died that way). He’s been told he’s got 15 minutes with
one person of his choice, and he’s chosen a passionate young mentee (let’s call
him/her) Jo – that’s you – and he’s downloading the most important life-lessons
from his adventures he can think of. He’s got to be quick, they’re coming soon.
He’s talking fast, and so am I. Are you ready? Write this down, Jo!
Here are my ten top life-lessons from two decades of working in Burundi:
It’s all about…
1) …grace – A young lady recently started working for our charity, Great Lakes Outreach, in Burundi. She was found down a toilet where her mother dumped her after giving birth. Someone saw this discarded piece of flesh in the filth, reached down, and picked her up. They cleaned her off and got poo on themselves in the process. She was still alive, was fed through a straw like a little bird, weighing just a few pounds. My friend who adopted her gave her the most beautiful girl’s name. When I married my wife Lizzie, I said to her that if ever we were blessed to have a daughter, I’d like to name her after that girl. So they share the same name. Grace!
The start of her life is a picture of the gospel, our message, the bedrock of our lives – it doesn’t matter whether we’re multi-murdering, raping, pillaging idiots in Central Africa or self-absorbed people in America (UK, wherever), all of us need God’s grace. And He in Christ reaches down from heaven to earth, bridges the chasm, picks us up, cleans us off, takes our filth on Him, and says to you and to me: “You’re my beautiful child. I love you this much (arms stretched out wide on the cross), now come, live for me!” That’s grace, and that’s our message. You can’t earn it, you just live in response to it. May that underpin everything we do. It’s all about grace, so let’s live grace-fully.
2) …gratitude – This is linked to grace, but building further on it. I had a man come to my house with a grenade to blow me up. He’d written me a letter saying he was going to cut out my eyes. Was that a fun experience? No, but it was one of the most defining experiences of my life. Let me tell you why:
Faced with the imminent prospect of losing these two little things (my eyes), let alone my life, I was consciously grateful for the first time for the gift of eyesight – which is a gift, not a right. Your challenge is that you live in an entitled culture and we are an entitled generation. It’s all about our rights. The best gift Burundi has given me is the gift of gratitude. Nothing is a right, everything is a gift. Food, health, education, security, friends, family, clean water, the list goes on. When I’m tempted to be self-pitying or thinking I’ve had a hard lot in life, I list off all those gifts. It’s a game-changer! Stop complaining. Don’t take anything for granted. Be grateful. Grateful people make happy people. You’ll be nicer to live alongside and therefore more effective in your work.
3) …humility – We usually think our culture is the best. We are so wrong! There is so much wrong with our greedy, individualistic, consumerist (I could go on) respective Western cultures. There is so much richness in our host cultures, because every culture has good and bad in it. Dig for the gems. Learn the language, the proverbs, the stories. Listen, listen, listen! Don’t criticize. For example, the African says to the American/Brit/etc: “You have watches, we have time!” They might just be late for your meeting because someone was dying on the side of the road as they came to meet you. How dare I arrogantly reproach them for their lateness, their ‘African time’, when they did ‘the Good Samaritan’ whilst I would have walked on by to honour my punctuality proudly whilst leaving someone to die…? Seriously? People are more important than schedules, aren’t they? Humility, humility, humility.
4) …relationship – One of my life mantras is ‘Everything is about relationship’. You can’t microwave or fast-track friendship and trust. Spend time with people. An African proverb says: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
In
2015, Burundi teetered on the edge of total implosion. It’s too politically
sensitive to go into details, but we had the holiest meeting of my life with
our key leaders. Were we willing to stand up and preach non-violence, forgiveness,
and dialogue, when the Church at large had completely gone to ground in fear?
Yes, on somber reflection, we were. But how could we do that and be effective?
Because the context of our relationships was that we had been meeting monthly
for breakfast for five years together, so we loved and trusted each other.
Honestly, it was amazing. We counted the cost. Thankfully nobody died in our
team, but we were ready.
It’s all about relationship, so live connected, invest the time, be patient, seek out and embrace genuine accountability with key folk, and you’ll go far together
5) …people – People, not stuff. Please care more for the folks you aim to come alongside than for your possessions. Live more simply. People, not stuff, and then people, not pets. The biggest criticism of missionaries has often been that they show more love for their pets than the people around them.
Maybe I’ll say more on this in the Q&A, but as far as you can, seek to work alongside the best local leaders of passion, integrity, gifting and vision. Our job is to encourage, equip, release. If you back a person of average passion/integrity/gifting/vision, the ceiling is set at mediocrity. Our work was so stunningly fruitful because I had the advantage of living in country and patiently observing and praying, so we were able to identify the best of the best, which meant the sky was the limit in terms of fruitfulness. I’ve lots more to say on that but time is ticking.
6) …patience – Rome wasn’t built in a day. When God wants to make a delicate mushroom, he does it overnight; but when he wants to make an sturdy oak, he takes decades. We want long-term fruit. Don’t over-estimate what you can do in one year, but don’t underestimate what you can do in ten. I look back and am blown away at what we’ve been able to do by God’s grace. But in any given one-year time-frame, I might have felt discouraged and overwhelmed, and not seen much obvious progress. Short-term missions have their place, but let’s be realistic on what can be accomplished in anything less than chunkier time-frames.
7) …now! Yes, it’s all about patience, but it’s also all about now! We want to live urgently. ‘Now is the time of God’s favour, now is the day of salvation.’ I once preached about living ready, being all in, people need saving and rescuing, etc, and two days later, those listeners were killed in a big rebel attack. Our message and mission is urgent. Live like you believe it’s true. Don’t waste time. You’ve got 1,440 minutes today that you’ll never get back again, so use them well. Be focused. Is this activity good use of my time? As C.S.Lewis said: “Anything which isn’t eternal is eternally out of date.”
8) …rhythm – Yes we should live urgently, but we have to work from a place of rest. Work hard and play hard. Don’t try to ‘go faster than grace allows’ (Brother Lawrence). Put first things first, which means being a worshipper before being a worker. Guard the secret place. Seriously. Be very accountable with somebody on this point. Cultivate intimacy with God through meditation, Scripture, prayer, etc, it’s an absolute priority if you want to be built to last. How are you doing on that one?
9) …the Kingdom – Kingdom capital K, or Church capital C. You’ve got your little patch. But remember the picture is so much bigger. Be part of the bigger whole. It’s not a competition. Help others around you. It’s not win/lose or lose/win. Go for win/wins. Their big slice of cake doesn’t mean my slice therefore has to be small. Let’s bake a bigger cake together! I fundamentally believe as you try to help others, God’s grace boomerangs back and smacks you hard in the face!
10) …faith – Choose faith, not fear. There’s lots to make us afraid. But no. Driving along one of the most dangerous roads in the world, my colleague leant across one day, and said to me with a glint in his eye: “Simon, isn’t it exciting, we’re immortal until God calls us home!” He’s right! Perfect love casts our fear. This life won’t last for ever, it’s not our home or end destination. My marriage proposal to Lizzie was: “Are you ready to be a young widow?” That was tested in the 2015 crisis, by this stage with three kids in tow. Fear said leave, but faith said stay, which links in with my next point…
11) …staying – Many years ago, I was on a short-term mission trip to Sao Paolo in Brazil. We went to work with street-children, who were in ample supply – the plan was to rescue 7 million in 3 weeks – I say that somewhat tongue in cheek because having the right expectations is very important. We went to the main square, and I’ve been in much more dangerous situations in Burundi many times over, but this was the most traumatic incident I’ve ever experienced. Fear often comes through not understanding the dynamics at play.
Essentially,
we were mugged by a gang of street-children. These weren’t cute little urchins
but damaged and dangerous little thieves who survived through knifing people,
stealing, etc. One of them about 10-years-old came over to our 6ft4in team
leader, cursing and spitting. He pointed at him angrily and spoke with venom
and hatred: “You may be big, you may be strong, but there’s only one of you!”
And then they attacked us, throwing glass bottles at us, which shattered on the
floor around us as we fled and sought police protection.
That
night, we processed the experience in the safety of the compound, sat around in
a group. I simply wept. I wept that we’d met just a handful of the seven
million screwed-up precious little street-children of Brazil. As I cried, the
team leader gently came alongside me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said
something that has left an indelible mark on me for the rest of my life. In
fact, it might have been the one thing I’d traveled all the way to Brazil to
learn: “Pity cries, and then goes away… but
compassion stays!” That rocked me. I returned a different person, resolved
to never walk away.
Jesus chose to ‘stay’, and so must we, to be authentic and consistent with His call on our lives, engaging with people’s pain. But ouch, it can hurt. It can be geographical, but ‘staying’ is more a heart attitude. It’s tempting in the face of so much @£$% that life throws up and all the overwhelming needs we get confronted with, to harden our heart, but no, we insist on staying soft. As Jackie Pullinger said: “God wants us to have soft hearts and hard feet. The trouble with so many of us is that we have hard hearts and soft feet.” Stay soft-hearted, hard-footed. Choose to stay.
12) …communication – It’s not what you say, but what they hear, and therefore understand. Can you hear the difference between gusura and gusura? No you can’t. One means to visit, the other means to fart. Tonal languages are subtle. I want to make sure I’m visiting the government minister and not farting on him!
My
friend Vicky’s flashlight broke, so she asked the hospital guard to walk her
home, except the word ‘walk’ and ‘have an affair’ are virtually identical in
Malagasy. He took her home thinking he’d struck the jackpot, and she had a
narrow escape.
One US lady was sharing her testimony in Francophone
Africa. She wanted to say in French that her
past was divided into two parts. Instead of ‘passé’ she said ‘derrière’ (behind,
backside). She went on to say that one part of her butt was black, one part was
white, and between the two there was a great chasm!
There
are both funny and serious examples, but suffice to say, so many problems come
through so many layers of complexity across cultures. Misunderstandings are
easy, so tread carefully. Communicate clearly. Choose the right means of
communicate. Get folks to state back to you what their understanding is. Two
ears, one mouth, listen listen listen! And don’t listen to just one side of any
story, it’s never the full picture.
And remember, it’s all aboutgrace, gratitude, humility, relationship, people, patience, now, rhythm, the Kingdom, faith, staying, communication. And there could have been more said on each point or even further points, but that’ll have to do.
Thanks
for farting with me, I’ve enjoyed your visit! Go for plenty of walks, avoid
having affairs. And may your derriere’s testimony be powerful, leading to many
changed lives!
And
more seriously, thanks for listening to my talk, which wasn’t quite 15 minutes,
or even 10 points as I’d agreed, but that was an unrealistic expectation from
an African – and I am indeed a proud African, a Burundian, one of about a dozen
white Burundians in the world!
So,
if I’m Paul, and you’re Jo, well I can hear the guards’ jangling their keys at
the cell door. I’m off to my graduation to glory. Whether it’s by
head-chopping, hanging, or feeding to the lions, ‘for me to live is Christ, to
die is gain!’ What a privilege! I’ll see you on the other side in due course.
Be assured, the call on your life to serve wherever in the world is absolutely
worth everything you’ve got. Yes, you’ll definitely receive plenty of sucker
punches along the way, but hang in there. It’s totally worth it. I say this,
and I know our heavenly Father says it, “I believe you’ve got what it takes to
be who He’s called you to be! Get out there, and change the world, one person
at a time!”
The Gospel according to Hollywood sometimes nails it.
In the film City Slickers, starring Billy Crystal and the late Jack Palance, they are riding slowly across the range on horseback, discussing life and love. Palance plays a wily cowpoke, while Crystal is a tenderfoot from Los Angeles who has paid for a two-week dude ranch vacation. Of course, he gets more than he bargained for, and in the process, Crystal learns something important about himself. Listen carefully to their slightly edited conversation:
PALANCE: You city folk. You worry about a lot of $£%@!, don’t you? CRYSTAL: $£%@!? My wife basically told me she doesn’t want me around. PALANCE: How old are you? Thirty-eight? CRYSTAL: Thirty-nine. PALANCE: Yeah. You all come out here about the same age. Same problems. Spend fifty weeks a year getting knots in your rope then . . . then you think two weeks up here will untie them for you. None of you get it. (Long pause) Do you know what the secret of life is? CRYSTAL: No, what? PALANCE: This. (Holds up his index finger) CRYSTAL: Your finger? PALANCE: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean $£%@!. CRYSTAL: That’s great, but what’s the one thing? PALANCE: That’s what you’ve got to figure out…
I recently finished speaking at a family holiday and Bible-teaching week at Lee Abbey in Devon, which we now do every year. It’s a fabulous place if you ever wanted to join us. So over the next few weeks, I’ll put out one talk at a time, if you fancy listening. The theme of the week was ONE THING, and this first talk was ‘One Thing I Ask/One Thing is Necessary’
This is me: 17th century, Brother Lawrence 1614-1691 writes of a person who was full of good intentions but ‘wants to go faster than grace allows’.
A.W. Tozer: “We take a convert and immediately make a worker out of him. God never meant it to be so. God meant that a convert should learn to be a worshipper, and after that he can learn to be a worker. The work done by a worshipper will have eternity in it.”
“These are days of much activity in the field of church and mission work, but no amount of activity in the King’s service will make up for neglect of the King Himself. The devil is not greatly concerned about getting between us and work; his great concern is getting between us and God. Many a Christian worker has buried his spirituality in the grave of his activity.” Duncan Campbell during the Hebrides Revival ‘49-53.
Smith Wigglesworth gave this challenge to Christians: “Be filled with the Spirit; that is, be soaked with the Spirit. Be so soaked that every thread in the fabric of your life will have received the requisite rule of the Spirit – then when you are misused and squeezed to the wall, all that will ooze out of you will be the nature of Christ.”
On the back of last week’s Phone-Call/Email from God, I got this brilliant response from a friend, which I wanted to share with you:
I know friends who read your emails and they are hungry for more of God. However, there is a passiveness in the ‘waiting for the phone call’. They are paralysed by the big end to the stories and they don’t know how to get there.
You have a powerful voice and many people read your emails what would be amazing would be to hear you encourage those first baby steps. There are few people who will read your email and reply to say ‘yes take me to Burundi’ (I know that isn’t just what you are asking), but there are plenty of people who maybe would be encouraged to take a first baby step. This could be simply cooking a meal regularly for a local neighbour, prayer walking their area, stopping to talk to a homeless person, choosing to help at Foodbank, there are endless examples.
For our journey, it started with inviting a group of mothers each week to our small apartment for an afternoon of chaos (five 3-year-old boys in a small space) and eating a meal together – how lonely those mothers were and how precious that time became – to me serving as a chair of governors at our local school which was so hard, yet now I am in conversation with the council about a city-wide education initiative using a project based learning linked with schools in Brazil. My husband followed a desire to find a house for some refugees and 18 months on finds he has started and now runs a city housing festival with nationwide impact.
I look back and think I waited too long for my ‘phone call’ moment. Actually we needed to get on and do… Ed Silvoso says start with asking someone you know what their needs are…
They are little steps but they start the adventure.
I guess what I am asking is please encourage people in your emails to take the first small step. The rest is up to God! As Christians, I think we get focused on the big ending and that can be intimidating as we don’t know how to get there, but how our hearts long for it! All our testimonies start with a small step.
She’s so right. Thank you, Jo! I hope what she wrote above is a helpful corrective and encouragement, and I’m genuinely sorry if my email(s) elicited anything negative in you, that’s the last thing I’d want.
Indeed, I look back on the Burundi adventure, and it was filled with many small steps. The first step was the prayer: ‘I’ll do anything, go anywhere!’ Then came the language-learning, the cultural adaptation, the building of relationships and trust.
Step by step, the hard yards.
So let’s not feel condemned, inadequate or passed by. As Oswald Chambers said: “It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional thing for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes.”
A phone call changed the trajectory of my life. Many of you know the story already.* And this weekend, we hung out with a man (pictured above, Lizzie and I, with Ted and Lorraine) for whom likewise a phone call rocked his world and gave it a remarkable trajectory. I want to share his story because you don’t need a phone call to experience what he and I have, but the potential of being open and ready to say ‘yes!’ is simply extraordinary.
Ted Bosveld was visiting Rwanda in 2006 when his phone rang. It was my best Burundian buddy Freddy on the line. He’d never met Ted, but he asked him to jump on a bus and come down to Burundi to see what was going on there with Youth for Christ. Ted knew nothing about Burundi, and declined.
He continues the story: “After my return to Australia, this conversation with a man I had never met, in a country I had never heard of, with a request I knew in my soul was way out of my comfort zone, beyond anything I had ever imagined doing, challenged me for many sleepless nights. It was a request to go to the world’s poorest country to help house and feed orphans.
I grappled with this for many months without ever communicating to Freddy my inner unrest. Finally, in December 2006, I emailed Freddy explaining all that had been challenging me over the past months since we had spoken on the phone. His reply was quick. He explained that he and his YFC team had been praying every Wednesday for a man named Ted from Australia, a man they had never met, from a country most of them had never heard of before. They were believing that God would move and do the miraculous. They believed that God would send someone from Tasmania, Australia, which is about as far away from Burundi as you can get. They were believing the impossible, from a God to whom nothing is impossible.”
To cut a long story short, Ted – a regular bloke working in the construction industry – started a charity called Villages of Life, and came alongside Freddy and GLO partner Youth for Christ. He started small, steadily mobilised others to join him in the vision, and twelve years later, there are now seven homes, a community centre / medical clinic, the best-ranked school in Cibitoke province with 430-plus students, and a sustainability farming project, with more in the pipeline.
Two phone calls. Two different stories.
Now, this isn’t a phone call, it’s a blog.
But it’s an invitation to ‘do a Ted’. As we sat on his patio and reminisced over a BBQ, I was struck by how God can use any of us in truly extraordinary ways.
My invitation today – not appropriate to some of you, no doubt – is to ‘flag’ this blog or put it in your ‘important’ folder, and then pray and ask God if He would take your life and write a Ted-type story, in Burundi or elsewhere in this needy world. And if you would say ‘yes’ to God, maybe in 12 years we could have a BBQ at your place and reminisce about the journey from that blog… why not?
If you’d like to write that story in Burundi, we’re as good a place as any. We’ve got some massive needs to address. Might God use you, starting small, to do something beautiful that impacts many lives? Give me a shout, and let’s do it together!
* I’d been praying: “God, I’ll do anything, go anywhere.” A man came to me asking/telling me I should go to Burundi. So I asked God for a radical sign about Burundi, sat at my desk job. I promptly took a call, and the voice on the other end asked me out of the blue: “Do you know anyone who wants to work in Burundi?” That was my call to Burundi, and it completely transformed and defined the last twenty years of my life.
What do you know about Slovenia? I knew virtually nothing until we went there this last week. And yesterday I got to preach at the biggest evangelical church in the country, which you’re probably thinking is a few thousand people strong. But no, it was maybe 130 people, because there are only about 500 evangelicals in the whole country! Out of a population of a little over 2 million people, that makes just 0.025%!
I think part of this year’s purpose as we travel and preach around the world is highlighting areas of need. The week before we were in Albania, with under 3000 believers out of their population of just over 3 million, i.e 0.1%. Before that in Macedonia (0.2%), which I blogged on before.
The gospel needs are huge! Do you want to get involved? Could you come as a teacher to one of these nations? Or a medical professional? Or start a business? Or just come and see? Often people say comments like ‘there are plenty of needs here in this nation to meet, so you shouldn’t go elsewhere’. I beg to differ. The needs are indeed everywhere, but much much greater in these countries than in the UK or USA. So hear the invitation from me right now – could this be for you? Do you want to be part of something so much bigger than you might have expected in this life? Just ask, and I’ll put you in touch.
From yesterday’s journal: “I preached, and the response was strong. Afterwards lots of folks came up and thanked me effusively for the passion, challenge and encouragement. Grace (as we’ve tried to encourage the kids to pray and see if God shows them whom He might bless through us) said that she wanted us to give money to a man in a purple T-shirt. He looked fine to me i.e. humanly-speaking wasn’t a stand-out case as someone in need. We asked our translator if he was in a bad way and she said yes, that his wife was looking after him and the need was acute, so we gave money to be passed on to her. That was encouraging. And then I was talking to a man called Mattheus, who told me he couldn’t work because of a dislocated finger. I asked if I could pray for him. After prayer, his eyes lit up and he said he could now move it where he couldn’t before. Brilliant! Doors are wide open to return, there are big opportunities, and all the key folks asked us to come back and serve here. Who knows, but certainly the needs are massive.”
If you want to get my journal updates, just message me. If you’re challenged about how you might get involved in such countries, again, just get in touch and I’ll connect you.
Well, on Saturday, he got married to his babe, Floride!
Nobody, NOBODY, could ever have believed this was possible, from being the ugliest disfigured reject in Burundi twenty one years ago. God is amazing!
In 1997, he had seven operations on his body, some lasting 8-10 hours, and was in a coma for four days. His body couldn’t take any more, and the surgeon said maybe a decade later more work could be done. In 2011 and 2012, we flew him to Kenya, he had four further operations, between 12 and 15 hours long! Mind blowing…
And then we sponsored him through his studies. He got a distinction in his degree (as did Floride), and now they are married. Wow, wow, WOW!
OK, so here’s the rub. He’s suffered so much, he’s dug so deep, it’s an amazing story, truly. But, he has become dependent and expectant of our help. That is unhealthy.
So this is my last mention of him, and we’ll see what the Lord does with it:
He and Floride trained as pharmacists, so they want to set up a pharmacy. She, despite her distinction, is unemployed. He just got a job and has been posted to the middle of nowhere with a salary of $60/month. That’s a disaster for them because they won’t be able to afford to see each other at weekends, and her living there in the bush with him is giving up on getting a job. They’ve done their research, and with $5,000 they can buy a pharmacy that is already operational off someone who has several and is ready to sell and help them get going.
Then, they’ll hopefully be set up for life. There’ll be no more need for help from our end, and there’ll be a beautiful sense of seeing an amazing story through.
No pressure, but do you want to be a part of it? If so, please click here. If more than enough comes in, we’ll be able to bless other folks in desperate need.
