Our guestroom

Despite of the unpainted walls, old floor and lack of sufficient furniture, our guestroom has already been a blessing. It is such a joy to be able to offer people a place to stay when they need it. We hosted a Mozambiquan missionary a couple weekends, a traveling Australian missionary last week and this week we were honored with the stay of a Malawian pastor we had come to know before. This pastor lives and ministers in the rural area about 80 km from here. Even though he lives in very primitive circumstances, he has worked on his Ph.D. in Theology over the last years. He would study by candle light, handwrite pages and pages and then come to town every other week to stay at a place with power and type all his writings and send it by email to the university in South Africa.

When he called us whether he could stay with us we had power and so he came, stayed and worked day and night to finalize his thesis. Amazingly the power was on all those hours he worked and when he finished… power went off. He gave  us some insight about his ministry, telling us how the difficult economic situation is affecting his church. People become poorer and poorer since prices go up while the value of crops go down and resources are finishing. The temptation to get money by other means also moves church members to go wrong. While the pastor was sharing with us how his church members are using witchcraft to get money out of people he was also busy  phoning the police, trying to get help in this problem. Members started to force others to give food or money, when they refused they were suspected to be witches, in order to cleanse the village from witches they got to do the poison test; you have to drink poison and when you stay fine you are recognized as a witch, when you get sick or die you are proven to be innocent. Even for the police it is difficult to intervene. I asked him whether he got any instructions / teaching during his training to become pastor that can help him now to deal with these terrible harmful problems.  No, not at all. The seminary he attended offered only government approved subjects, excluding ‘how to deal with traditional African customs in the church’ and so he just asked us “what must I do?” He had already been praying and fasting the last days at home. This is just one example of the huge challenges the church in Malawi (Africa) is facing.

For all those pastors in rural area’s I wished there was an affordable solar system in which they could just have a light bulb shining at night to enable them to study and prepare sermons, charge a laptop and a phone, to create more infrastructure for communication. When the pastor arrived at home he found the roof blown off his house and his wife admitted in the hospital… while he was finishing his Ph.D thesis in our guestroom. Please, pray for all God’s servants in primitive conditions as they have so many extra challenges on top of the overwhelming workload. Preaching and teaching God’s Word to a congregation of which 90% is illiterate and is still deeply rooted in the traditional, unbiblical worldview.

Closing with something else; we will be going to Covenant College, Zambia in just an hour to pick up our belongings. Finally we got permission and we decided to go as a family. We are looking forward to meet our dear Zambian friends, spend time with them and organize the move. We are hiring a truck and a driver who will follow us. Please, pray that everything will go well. We are quite anxious since just about anything can go wrong… especially because we have to cross the border. We will need patience and health. Cees got the flu a couple weeks ago and it hasn’t cleared up since. Hopefully he will have enough energy to do the big job of moving… these are the times we have to watch ourselves not to envy the conveniences  of ‘the west’ where one can use a move company at affordable rates…

May the Lord bless you! 

Mirjam