My Dearest Family and Friends,
How are you all? I have been okay. These past few weeks have been getting harder and harder for me. If you haven’t heard, or haven’t been doing the calculations, two months from the time you read this, I will have been home for a few days! It is exciting to think about it, but it also saddens my heart deeply. As the days go by, I bond more with the youth at FireHouse, more with the people at LIghtHouse, more with the people at my ministry, and more with my fellow team-mates. I have truly loved everyone I work with and see, and right now, I feel so at home here. I feel as if I could stay here for a longer period of time, but God has other things in mind for me.
One of the biggest struggles our team has started to face is how short of a time we will actually be here. Nicole, one of my team-mates, just left to be with her family in the states a week ago. As her trip ended, we saw how much people had bonded to her and their sadness as she left. This all brought a new atmosphere to our team dynamics. It brought a new realization to the people at LightHouse Family Church of how short a time we are here, and how cautious we all need to be with these next few months, that there won’t be too much despair and heart-ache when we leave. Yet, I feel as some of them do that getting attached and getting closer is something that naturally happens when we all work so closely together, and is hard to stop.
Within our team, a lot of us now start to long for home, counting down the weeks and days until we finally get to go home. The passion is starting to die off from excitedly working for Jesus to not wanting to go to ministry. On the other hand, there are the few that realize how much more work is to be done here and are pushing ourselves to give everything our all, but fall into exhaustion, becoming physically, emotionally and spiritually drained, as I have started to feel.
Ministry has been hard lately. With Doreen, “the Walmer Orphanage,” she has started to get more and more stressed out because of the fifteen kids she has. The stress is causing high blood pressure and nose bleeds. Lately, sleep has become something that she does less and less. Recently, she got four more kids in her house, which added to the stress she was already feeling. I felt like I needed to help her, so I took my day off and stayed at her house to help her with the new kids. There was so much work, and so much to deal with that I really didn’t feel like I helped out that much. She still only got 3 hours of sleep when I stayed there. I am getting so worried for her, she needs a break, perhaps someone to also live with her 24/7 to help with the kids, but none of these things are happening… I am afraid that if she continues on with this getting no more help that it would probably kill her. Please pray for Doreen that she would get more help from somewhere and be able to take the break she needs.
FireHouse, the Youth Group, has been recently under spiritual attack. Individuals have been having trouble with this especially. It is more prone to attack because of what power this youth group holds, and how much Christ is working in them. Please pray especially now that God would protect the kids going there.
In me, realizing there are two months left on one hand I push myself more to making the days I spend with people count and memorable… pushing myself too much. If you ever remember my life last year while in High School, College, five music classes and everything in between, my life looks pretty similar, except instead of schooling, ministry, and I push myself to exhaustion, and beyond. On the other hand, realizing there is only two months left here, I think more and more about what life will be like when I get home. I know I shouldn’t do this, but I already have started to stress about what life will be like when I get home.
I worry about what friendships will be like when I get home. I hope and wish that everything will be the same when I get back, as if I have pushed pause on my life at home and will be able to start my life where I left off as soon as I push play. But as I wrote earlier to a few friends at home, I know how sorely wrong I am about this. Not only will people at home have changed, but I have changed myself. I am not the person who got on that plane in Spokane last September. I have changed so much even within myself. I have seen heart-ache, sadness, poverty. I have overcome emotional wounds and have learned to forgive, and have grown so much closer to God. With all this change, I scare myself thinking that thing will be so different between me and the ones I love that there will be nothing left in common, and friendships will have been lost. This has especially scared me.
One thing great that happened was I got a job for when I get home, working at Riverview Bible Camp in Kitchen Staff. I am so excited, it has been confirmed that this is where I am supposed to be this summer, but at the same time I think of how this place is two hours away from where I live, which means even when I am home, I will still be far away. In a sense, I will still be on the mission field, which I am excited to continue working for Christ, yet I will not be home, close to the ones I love… to be able to go to coffee with, to a movie with or truly have time to catch up and be with everyone I love. I feel that everything will have to be done by appointment over a very tight weekend. I wonder if I will even truly get time to rest after this adventure.
All of this in combination and with a spiritual attack that happened last night, I started to shake and worry. I even got worried that something might have happened at home and panicked. I had my mom call me, and when she did, I wept from the stress that I have been going through for 15 minutes, letting out all this emotion bottled up inside of my spirit… the frustration, fear, sadness, stress, tiredness, everything relieved inside of me as I cried. After it all, I took out my Bible and read the Psalms to comfort me through this stress.
I especially need prayer with these last few months that God would renew my strength and give me rest, so that I could continue with the work I do here in South Africa to the end. And do pray for my team. We found out yesterday that another team-mate, Victoria, has been called to go home to be with her family and will leave in the next few days. Pray for me as well that the Lord would relieve my stress and give me joy that I might continue to keep the people around me laughing with joy as well.
Love,
Andrew
PS-I DID IT!!! Finally… a two page blog, instead of one.
