I had another pretty incredible week in Masi. It’s amazing to witness, and be a part of, the move of God in a place. It is happening here — there is no doubt about it. Here’s a sampling of the highs and lows of the last three days:
Thursday
Thursdays currently are probably our busiest day. We always seem to have at least 3 meetings to get to. This week was no different — we started out with four meetings on our todo list. But this Thursday ended up being somewhat different — it was actually the day of answered prayer. The first was with the Zimbabwean group that officially started last week. As we were walking to their place we actually met two of the women. They were super excited to see us and even more glad that we were coming but weren’t actually able to meet. Lines got crossed (as is oft an issue here) and our contact into the group was out of town. But this was a good thing as it was an answer to prayer (he needed to get back home to Zim to attend a funeral). That wasn’t the only answered prayer of the group though: one man that we had prayed to get a job actually got a job after we prayed (which is a really significant thing) and another woman whom we had prayed for to have a safe and easy birth had just that.
Since we didn’t need to have a full blown Bible study with them, we used our newfound time to visit the other existing Zimbabwean house church. We found out that one of their prayers had been answered to (the one for safe birth). After briefly sharing with them, we headed to the house with the white picket fence (from the treasure hunt story I told last week). The man we met was there, as where 4 friends that he invited. We all had Bible study and it was a significant time — one of the women was touched enough that she broke down and shared her heart with all of us and we had a chance to pray for her and her husband. It was certainly one of those “Holy Spirit” moments.
After this, we took some time, as a group, to specifically lift up Masi in prayer. This was also a significant time as God gave me a verse to specifically pray into and for Masi (and for those reading this note, you can pray this as well): Isaiah 45:8 which says, “O Sky! Rain down from above! Let the clouds send down showers of deliverance! Let the earth absorb so that salvation may grow and deliverance may sprout up along with it. I, the Lord, create it.”
Friday
It’d be easy to label Friday as a down day, but God was still on the move, and it was good because of that. Our first appointment was with someone spiritual intrigued but timid. They weren’t willing or interested in gathering friends and family and where a bit shy to talk. But, as we shared with him, he started to completely open up. The passage God put on my heart was exactly what he was needing to hear (the story of the persistent widow) and while he came to the Bible study with a heart hardened towards prayer, he left wanting to continue to press into God. This, at the very least was encouraging, and we are going to follow up with him but as of now it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to plant anything else with him.
We then wandered around and “hunted” on the streets. It went fairly but their wasn’t anything spectacular to write about. We did come awfully close to getting a contact high (one of the houses we were invited into reeked of mary jane) but thankfully didn’t stay long enough for this to be an issue. We also had a meeting with a woman that we keep crossing paths with but who appears to be a grade A distractor — she is wanting all the prayer she can get, but when it comes to Bible study and putting into practice the Word of God, she seems totally uninterested. It’s a shame, but we are going to try one more time with her (she was drunk on this day).
I’m actually going to write and tell the story of Saturday in a separate blog post because it is incredibly powerful and special. I’ll try and do this tomorrow after I sleep so get excited for it!