A view days late, for a view days of God’s Glory being revealed. As you can tell I’m fairly late with this blog update. But I have good reasons as the last 4 days we were out at a soon-to-be orphanage doing some work and evangelism. But I will get into the details of that after talking about last week.
The lecture week last week was very strange for me. We were talking about Intercession and Spiritual warfare, and during my DTS Daniel and Suzy (base leaders here) came and spoke about this topic and did an incredible job. My expectations for the week were very high even though Daniel and Suzy were not teaching it on this DTS. Sadly my personal expectations were not meet, though not a bad thing as I know many of the students were very pleased about how the teaching went and what was spoken about. For me though, it was very different then what I had in mind that the week was going to be about, as this teacher went a completely different direction and in my point of view not necessarily the direction that we, as staff, saw fit for the time. Don’t take me wrong though it was still a great week and people were blessed by the teaching. She spoke of important things that are helpful and was very encouraging to each one of us. Even I became blessed by the teachings, once I put aside my own desires for the week. One of the real points that made impact in me was the area of praying the Bible. I know for a lot of people, especially myself, that praying can either get boring or you can’t think of words to say anymore. Along with that sometimes we may think that our prayers don’t have power or God won’t answer them, but when praying the Bible, they are prayers that have already been blessed, as they are from God already. It’s a powerful way to pray as we take the prayers from the Bible, reading them allowed, but also putting into our own words and into the certain situation we are praying for.
As the week’s speaker didn’t have intention of speaking on spiritual warfare as much as we wanted to, Daniel spoke about it in our weekly “community” meeting that we had on Wednesday evening. I’ve always loved the way Daniel teaches and how he always pulls part of his own life into the mix. We mostly talked about he came to know about that there is a spiritual word but then moved onto to talk about the different spiritual words and how we have authority over them, though most of the time we only have authority over the spiritual world around us (as in the human spiritual sense) and not necessarily the second level of the spiritual world (this is the spiritual area that hovers over different areas of the world, as in depression, addictions, etc). It was cool to really look into the spiritual world and talk about it with people; I came to realize that I know little about it, though I fully believe in it. It’s something that I’d be interested in reading more about it. I’d also be interested in hearing what other people back in Canada think about the Spiritual world. As I think it’s something we really push aside in western cultures, I know I did even coming home after my DTS and learning so much about it. So please e-mail me or write comments down below with your comments about it, if you disagree with things I’m saying or agree I’m still very interested in what you have to say about it.
After the busy week and much deliberation about the weekend and the outreach that we were planning we finally left for eastern Malawi, less than an hour from Mozambique, Saturday afternoon. It was a long bumpy drive as most drives through the villages are around here. Though it was such a crazy drive I had a blast doing it as the road was in the middle of construction so as times we were off the road and on dirt roads and others zipping across the paved roads. Along the way there were lots of bridges being built so we were always going up, down and around road blocks, but half the time they weren’t really necessary so we would just drive up the step bank from the dirt road back up onto the paved road. At one point we were going around a road block and my heart stopped as I was so scared that the truck was going to tip over as it was on such a crazy angle. Once we were about 20 minutes away we stopped in the closest trade post to buy some food and we realized that we had two punctured tires, one in either vehicle. Thankfully we just drove up the road and found some people who were able to fix both tires as we waited for out food to be. It was cool to see how they did it since I have done it many many times when I worked as a mechanic. They used some of the same tools and things we would use, though they don’t have the big machines that we use to take the tire off. I think that they even did it just as fast as I would have done it back home at the mechanics. The crazy thing was that they fixed both tires for less than 5 Canadian dollars.
The outreach itself was incredible, we got there late Saturday night so we couldn’t see any of the area that we were in, but in the morning it was so beautiful. We were more a less in field with very little around us. We started ministry right away on Sunday morning after a fairly decent night’s sleep. We lead most of the church service in the small building, having a drama, two testimonies, and some people lead us in some Malawian songs. Dave, our weekly speaker and friend of Daniel and Suzy from the UK, preached and spoke some powerful words. After Dave had preached Daniel went up and he spoke about the power in healing, both from witch craft and God’s healing hand. Talking about how both have power, though God’s is free and makes true healing within. Once we had spoken about different types of witch craft we invited people to come forward who wanted to repent for turning to witch craft and not God, but also repenting for sins of witch craft within the family line as well. When praying we really felt a burden being lifted off people, though once we started praying for people to be healed from physical things we had some difficulties. Still feeling the weight of witch craft possible or some other way that the enemy was trying to stop us, but God is all powerful and conquers all wars with the enemy.
The next two days where very similar in pattern as we started each morning with an hour of praying as a team and then jumped into Dave doing some pastoral teaching that the students sat in, just to make sure that we had enough teaching for this week as it is a requirement for YWAM to have a certain amount of teaching each week. After lunch Pastor Size (who lives with us and is our carpenter at the moment) kept going with the pastoral training, but the YWAM team separated into two different teams. One team staying around with the children and playing some games with them, taking them down to the local soccer field and playing some games with them there.(sadly the first day they broke the soccer ball that I had just bought the day before we left) The other team would leave mid afternoon and head out to a village nearby and show the Jesus movie. I was part of the Jesus movie both nights as it is something that I’m helping organize most of the time and it’s really where my heart lies, though I do love working with the kids as well. God really moved both nights, even though both nights had some small issues. Both nights we had over 100 people come forward and write down their names, meaning that they gave their live to Christ for the first time there and wanted to join the local church. Upon completing the movie we did our typical call for those who are sick to come forward and get healed. The first night was so hectic during the time of healing and after praying for about 5 people I was incredible exhausted and felt so claustrophobic and had to get out of the middle of the circle of people. It really reminded me of the fact that it’s not my power or might that is healing anyone during these times, but it’s truly God as I was very distant even while praying for people. The second night was incredible exciting for me though during the time of healing. I was really reminded of the time in the Bible when Jesus heals an old man who couldn’t walk and once he was healed the man jumped up and danced around for hours. This was very similar in that night, the very first person I prayed for was an old man who had some bad knees and could barely walk. Before I even finished praying he started jumping up and down, dancing around and rejoicing. For the next half an hour, every time I saw this elderly man he was jumping, dancing around telling people he has been healed, it was amazing to see how excited this man was about life now that God had healed him. It was a real blessing to be part of it, especially as many people who get healed her don’t act so excited they think that when they act excited they will have to pay more since that is how it is with the witch doctor. Though we always make sure to bring up the point that God’s healing is completely free and is a gift from Him.
As this is getting to be very long I’ll wrap up the rest of our time there quickly. The biggest reason we went there was that they had just finished putting in a well and we had some practical work to do with adding a water tank, putting in the pluming for a couple showers and bathrooms. Though we didn’t get as much of that work done as we wanted to, due to the builders not being done there part yet, we did get some of the pipes put in and the builders got a good amount of work done. We are planning to go back in a couple months to finish the water tank and the showers/bathroom.
The whole outreach was an incredible blessing both for us and for the people that we met. The biggest blessing was having such a great team to be part of. The students on this DTS are so great and really dove into the work we were doing. They also worked really well together as a team and though we had a couple small arguments we got through them and still have great united as a team.
Now back at the base we are doing two long days of teaching (Thursday/Friday) and then having a couple days off on the weekend. Though I know people are tired we are also really excited about what else Dave has to say to us in the next two days. He has really been a blessing and he has a great teaching style and is a really great guy to have around.
I don’t think I’ll be writing on Sunday again as this is so long, I’ll just leave it to next weekend especially since this weekend I won’t be doing much anyways.
One last thing that I just want to mention is that we have a couple needs here on the base. We are looking to expand the amount of sleeping space we have so we need to make some more beds and buy a couple other things for us to have more people on the base. It would be really great if you would be able to support us in that area both with your prayers and especially financially. If you are able to give, any amount at all, please let me know and I’ll give you more information on what you’re helping out in and also how you can send the money my way. We’d really appreciate any help that you’d be able to give.
Thanks for all the prayers and support.
Many blessings from the YWAM team here in Blantyre.
-Travis VR
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