Pray Now Zimbabwe

1/31

Pastor Lovejoy is starting his circuit around the different churches in the area to talk about the upcoming Prayer Summit, so we visited a different church this morning. It was in English, so I was happy! And it comes as no surprise that the people were once again, so full of passion for the Lord. I felt a twinge of hope regarding my faith situation.

The sermon today was regarding Exodus, Chapter 5. It was the story of Moses and Aaron going to Pharaoh to ask him to let their people go. Pharaoh, in turn, added an even heavier workload to the slaves’ already tough work. The pastor then spoke about how Christians tend to live a harder life. They constantly have the Devil after them. The stronger the person, the more Satan wants him away from God. It helped me to put things into perspective about the battle for my spirit going on right now. I still have a hard time believing it, but there is a God who is fighting for me. He loves me. The Enemy just continues to hit me where I’m most vulnerable. So I can’t say that it changed everything and the light to Heaven is now shining down on me, but it did spark a little glimmer in my heart.

On another note, I ate at my first restaurant since I’ve been here. It was called Wimpy’s, and we went after church today. It was Juliet, Pastor Lovejoy, and myself, along with two other men. One that was a big part of the church we attended, and the other was a man that Pastor Lovejoy had led to the Lord over 25 years ago. That man is now an active Christian, bringing Christ to the world. The restaurants don’t give you anything to drink, so I had to purchase water, and we all had tea. (Tea seems to be the staple drink here.) I wasn’t very hungry though, because we had just eaten breakfast a little bit ago, so I just got a salad. Their “salad” was a big plate of cooked beans, coleslaw, beets, and some sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, with two small pieces of lettuce. Note to self: never order a salad in Zimbabwe again. It was pretty gross, but it was lunch, so I ate it all anyways.

Then we head home and Juliet and I did laundry. This was my first time to experience the process that goes into getting clean clothes here, and oh boy did it open my eyes! I’ll attach some pictures. We don’t have any running water today, so Juliet and I used a minimal amount in the bathtub. There was a bar of laundry soap stuff that we had to scrub and scrub at the clothes and soak them in already dirty water. It was quite an in-depth procedure. Juliet kept laughing at me for my poor attempt to maneuver the clothes with a certain technique. It took a long time and I don’t know how effective it was. One thing I do know, though, is that I will NEVER see doing the “laundry” at home as a chore the way I did before. Thank God for washing machines!!! Then we wrung every article of clothing out and hung it with clothespins out on the line to dry. Again, who knows how effective that will be since I’ve already seen plenty of bugs on them. I guess I should just be thankful in general, not just for the clean-ish clothes, but also for opening up my eyes to the beauty of washing and drying machines, which I had so totally taken for granted before.

Juliet is working on dinner while I’m working on this right now. We just took a break from those to go fetch water from the well since we’re out of the bit we’d had. I miss running water! That was quite an experience as well. I took the liberty of working the crank to get the full effects of it. My arms are definitely tired right now. We then carried the water buckets back to the house on our heads! I just carried the small ones and used my hands to brace it, but most of the women here carry huge loads of different things on their heads without using their hands to balance it… I have absolutely no idea how they do it! That is one of my goals for while I’m here though- to learn to carry a bucket on my head, hands-free. I’m off to help Juliet with dinner tonight though, so hopefully I don’t completely destroy our meal!