A Little Background

Hello to everyone reading this! I hope you enjoy reading about what God is teaching me and doing in my life the next couple of months.

Words cannot express how excited I am to have the chance to go back to Mumena, Zambia. As many of you know, I got the opportunity a little over a year ago to study abroad in Zambia for about three months. During those three months, I completely fell in love with the Zambian culture and people. I lived in the southern province of Zambia on a mission site called Namwianga. While living there we got to take trips to different places to get a little glimpse of how different missionaries do things in different places. One of those trips we took was to a city in northern Zambia called Mumena. It is about an hour from the Congo. During our stay there, I completely fell in love with everything!

 Here is one of my favorite pictures from a refugee camp in Mumena.

After we left, I had been praying that if it was God’s will for me to go back to Mumena that He would open doors and allow it to happen. Well here is the story about how He started opening doors for me to go:

During the summer after I got back from Africa, I wanted to go back and do an internship through Harding in Mumena. I knew this wasn’t going to be possible because I needed to save up enough money to not be getting an income that summer. I had wanted to be a supervisor for lifeguarding and to coach a swim team. I ended up getting both jobs, even though I thought both of them were kind of a long shot. It ended up being the craziest summer! But my “plan” to go somewhere was working out (because I got the jobs so I wouldn’t have to work the next summer). I started praying a lot for God to make it clear to me if He wanted me to go to Mumena. When I asked God to make it very clear, He did… I found out when I got back to school in the fall, that all but two families on the team were going back in to the US and this summer one of those two families was going to be home all summer for furlough. So I saw that as God making it clear to me that he didn’t want me doing an internship with Harding. So I had the mindset that I wasn’t going to Africa. I was just going to go home and do school and coach again.  

Well…one night at AMF (an All Missions Fellowship bible study that I go to on Sunday nights) one of the missionary families from Mumena, the Loves, were on furlough and they had dropped in and were the speakers for that night. They started off by asking the question, “Who all feels they are being called to be long term missionaries abroad?” and pretty much everyone including me raised our hands. Then he asked, “Who all wants to be a teacher?” I kept my hand raised. He then asked, “Who all would be willing to teach two kids this summer?” I was the only one that still had their hand raised. He said, “But really, we are looking for a teacher that can come teach our kids this summer because it is taking away time that we could be spending with the people.” Afterwards, I went up to Karen and told her that I had been praying about going back to Mumena and that I really wanted to teach. She almost started crying when I said that. She told me that she had been praying for someone to be willing to come to teach their kids. They told me more about it, they said I would teach in the mornings and then afterwards I could do whatever I wanted to do (including going out into the villages and doing what they would normally do).  I prayed about it for a few weeks, and I felt that it was what God wants me to do for this summer.

I am just beyond excited that I get to go this summer! God is changing me every day, and I think back to the person I was over a year ago. The person that was just about to walk on a plane to spend the next three months living in Africa. I feel like I wouldn’t even know that girl. Since then, God has opened my eyes to His world and not my own little world. I am not the same and will never be the same again and I am rejoicing now in knowing that. This summer and every day for the rest of my life, I want to Glorify God by giving EVERYTHING I have and completely emptying myself for Him each day. I want to lay down in my bed each night knowing that I gave everything I have to glorify God.

Some things I want to do while being there if Lord willing:

-Become best friends with someone or several people.

-Go into town or where ever you go to buy seeds with some of my friend(s)

-Make a garden with those seeds that I buy.

-Spend time with those friends, having God breathed conversations or just simple actions to Glorify Him.

-I would love to see or help with giving birth (trust me mom if you are reading this I wouldn’t do anything dangerous that I wouldn’t do here in the US ;)).

Here are a few things that I would ask for you to be praying for:

-Snakes: I don’t know if it’s just because I don’t like them at all or if it is like a spiritual thing that scares me (Genesis 3)

-Not to be scared of no one understanding everything or caring about everything that happened during the summer because I am going to be the only one coming back. I won’t have a whole group of people who understand how I feel like last time

-To help me to want to learn the language even though I know it’s going to be hard

-Provide funding for me to get over there

A little note about myself… I am not the best speller and for that matter writer, but hey this is my adventure :) so you will have to excuse all of my misspellings and writing errors.