Kiss his cross or he won’t shake your hand.
So serve we did, in our “half” day, we saw 400 people for eyeglasses, pictures and HIV training and gave 200 pairs of shoes to orphan children. The Lord multiplied our efforts miraculously, this is how many we serve in a whole day. In our other “half” day the team gave eyeglasses to 300 people.
Why the eyeglasses? 60% of the Amhara region has eye problems. Low lighting for life, poor cleaning habits, no meds, no docs. Why shoes…obvious, most people have none or little protection on their feet from disease. Simply…it meets a need and gives the very few believers here access to speak the gospel. Why the gospel? If you didn’t know… There are 18 million people in the Amhara region of Northern Ethiopia. Most are Orthodox caught in a dead religion and deceived by evil spirits. There are only 20,000 Christians. Do the math. If your among those doubting… Saying the Orthodox church has been here for years, their Christian… Come and see for yourself. Come and spend the hours I’ve spent with Orthodox priests who have renounced satan and the witchcraft of the priesthood that they have learned since children. Talk to those who have received the gospel afresh and know Christ alone as salvation and true deliverance from darkness. Then we’ll talk. (attitude intentional)
The best part of the day today? Watching the team work. ALL the team! Our team is not only Anna, Ron, Crystal, Dave, Terry, Chuck and me; We were joined from the beginning by a group of college students from the local university. Ya, they know the language, and like our young people in the US, they understand a bit of the culture, but they too needed time to develop. And by this day my translator had hit full stride. He set up the full foot-washing station, directed all the people in it. It was sweet! It wasn’t an easy setup either… Biggest issue, there’s a lady having a baby in our room.
So here’s the scene, walk into a larger room that has three rooms inside of it. As we walked through the clinic it was the best we could do. The best? This place smelled like death. Really, we should have all been wearing masks. Heck one of those space suits that they use in those sci-fi scenes during the “cleanup” would have been nice. I didn’t want to be there. Just bein’ honest…I didn’t want my team to be there. Anna, 17, sweet Anna, she’s gonna be on her knees in this place for hours washing feet that are as filthy as this room. Crystal hasn’t been feeling well, so just the smell of this place has her queazy. (She actually needed to take a few breaks today to settle her stomach) Chuck and Bob, their pretty much up for anything, But I’m worried about the girls and their translator. Like a big brother I want to protect and provide. Their my friends, they’re my sisters. But God is our dad. Now what?
Well as we first walk in we see a few people milling about…we ask them to leave. They’re nervous, they’re reluctant. We soon find out they are here waiting for a woman having a baby…in our room! Are you kidding me? Here?!
We determine that shes in one room, we’ll be in the others…no problem…ya right. We begin to work around that awkward scene and begin to set up. Eventually the awkward scene comes to us. There she is squatting down in our space. Oh my did I struggle with that one. But looking at my young team, I needed to suck it up and move on. We gathered, we prayed. What the Lord said to me in that moment was “this is life here, do you really think that the sterile room in the US is what saves you?”. I remembered Angi. I remembered my girls deliveries. I remembered the one the Lord took before she had a name. It’s that simple. Life is fragile and it is begun and sustained by the Lord. We can trust the Lord in this situation It ain’t perfect, it ain’t sterile, but God will protect that baby, and God will protect us. So I encouraged my translator to lead well and we moved in and moved on. Before you know it we were serving our guests in our God space to do what he called us to today.
People were served, the gospel was shared, people made a new profession of faith, churches will be planted.
Really loving reading your stories.
speechless…