A Meal A Week For Mozambique

I often hear people ask, "How do I know if God is speaking to me?" That's a good question, and God speaks in multiple ways. Sometimes God speaks when factors converge.

As with many congregations of Jesus-followers, our church is observing the season known as Lent. Lent is a period of roughly 40 days leading up to the observance of the death of Jesus of Nazareth, and our belief that God raised Jesus from death. Followers of Jesus often use Lent as a time of reflection, penitence for our distance from God, and sacrifice. Some are in the habit of making specific sacrifices, such as giving up certain food or practices, or maybe giving up a meal a week.

In a community called Mucocane in the poverty-stricken African nation of Mozambique, there is a church community of our particular denomination. Against widespread disease, hunger, and want, this church is growing with vibrancy in reaching people for Jesus. Like many places in Mozambique, the absence of fresh water in Mucocane is a constant battle. People have to make a 6 kilometer walk one way to get any fresh water at all. Reliance on tainted water results in constant disease and death. In addition to what the church people in Mucacane can scrape together, $10,000 given through our denomination's Mozambique Initiative would facilitate the digging and operating of a well.

If 200 people in our church gave up a meal a week, named $10 as the cost that would go into that meal each week, set aside that $10 a week, then brought the accumulated money on Easter weekend, the well would be bought! For the price of sacrificing a meal a week, lives would be saved for generations to come.

Where the need of people God loves intersects with our ability to meet that need, that's God speaking! I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

A Kayak!

I began this blog on February 23, 2008. In that post I explained that I spend a lot of time canoeing Missouri Ozark streams. At the time, I was dreaming about a kayak as my next vessel of choice for rivers. Last Thursday - March 3, 2011, I brought home a ten foot fishing kayak, a little over three years after first posting my future hope.

It took longer than I expected to get it. At times over the last three years I came near amassing the right amount of funds to get it done, only to have some other financial need in our household put be back to square one. Sometimes I thought it would just be better to give up on the idea of owning a kayak. Now I can hardly believe that it is actually sitting out on our back porch.

Similarly, God's vision for our future rarely happens according to a time line or project plan that we would select and prefer. It would be easy at times to give up on it. When it finally arrives it may not be as we would have pictured it. Yet God's future most certainly will unfold.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river - in a kayak...finally!