Saved by the Mud

I mentioned that rainy season was about to begin here, and last Sunday that was proven correct in classic style. It was raining hard for the second day in a row with a chilly wind. Rainy days are always low attendance days at church. Who likes to get out of bed to trudge somewhere through the rain and muddy roads? We always hope that our church members have grown enough in grace that mud and chilly wet will mean nothing in comparison to being with believers and submitting themselves once again to hear the Word, but every rainy Sunday is another test.

This Sunday we had especially hoped for good attendance, as we were hoping to try a new tactic in the war for souls. We have several regular visitors who haven't committed to following Christ, so we decided to start a 5-week prospective members class in the Sunday School hour just to target these folks and present salvation, baptism, and our church covenant in a clear manner. We had about ten people lined up for the first class, but our spirits were dampened by their apparent drowned attendance.

Really stuck!

Then the other family (we only have one family besides our own in our church that includes husband, wife, and kids--and a car!) got their truck stuck in the mud on the road to church. It took an hour and a half to extract them. The situation became even stickier, or should I say muddier, when we noticed that they had brought first-time visitors with them on this rare Sunday. They were discouraged to have such a setback on the day their visitors came with them. We were worried to start a new class without all of our beloved prospects attending. And all the men were wet, cold, and muddy when we began the service.

Ita vita African. This truly could be an apt description of normal life in Africa. Some discouraging setbacks just when you were hoping to make a good impression; poor attendance for weeks at a time in the rainy season. But God was working all of those seemingly bad events to ordain a private evangelism meeting between me and one of the children in my Sunday School class.

When Mr. N__ got stuck in the mud and all the men and boys went to help, I (with my kids) was left alone with one sweet neighbor girl who has attended my S.S. class and Seth's neighborhood Bible club all year. As I fiddled around setting up church stuff, she came to me and asked shyly, "How does a person go to Hell or to God?"

Seth's Bible club: they learn verses and the catechism (yellow book). She's the girl in the blue tank top, back row, third from the left.

Because of the rain and the car stuck in the mud, I was given an uninterrupted fifteen minutes to show a tweenage girl The Great Exchange from 2 Corinthians 5:21. I love this verse. In English every word but one has one syllable. Yet it encompasses so much with those little words.

For he hath made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.

Praise the Lamb slain for sinners! Praise the Creator of the rain and mud who kept distractions away from a child He was busy pulling from the filth of a life lived for sin, at the same time as Seth was pulling a truck out of the mud. She seemed to respond to the Word in faith.

Obviously the mud didn't save her. But in one sense, it did. God used it as a means to give this shy child one-on-one time with her teacher so that she could ask a very important question! Last Sunday, a child was saved by the blood, by the mud.

Seth and I also were saved by the mud in a sense. We were saved from discouragement and ingratitude over the lack of optimal conditions that day. We were reminded that God doesn't need dry roads to do His work and that His plans are wiser than ours.

Once I heard a sermon by R.C. Sproul on 2 Samuel 6 when God struck Uzzah dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant so that it wouldn't fall from the oxcart. I've never forgotten how Sproul mentioned that Uzzah's error was in thinking that his hands were cleaner than the dirt. He thought it would be better for him to touch the ark--he, a sinful creature--than for the ark to fall in the dirt. But the dirt was doing what God made it to do. I thought of that Sunday--the mud was doing what God made it to do. I couldn't be mad at the mud or at God for letting it rain on Sunday. He had a plan even for the mud; and it did what He made it to do, even being an instrument in God's plan of redemption for a child.

When Mr. N__ finally arrived at church, embarrassed and a bit careworn, I greeted him happily. "You may think this was a bad day," I said, "but I am glad you got stuck in the mud!"

My S.S. class quoting Psalm 1 for the church. She's first on the left, back row, of the girls' side.

Still happy, even after scrubbing our family's muddy clothes!

The Pastor's Paycheck ~ A Prayer Request

My husband has been preaching through 1 Corinthians this year, and yesterday he arrived at the first half of chapter nine in which the apostle Paul challenges the Corinthians over their lack of financial support for him. We deem this lesson crucial to our baby believers as well; yet we are reticent to preach on the topic unless it comes up naturally through the course of expositional preaching, as it did yesterday.

This passage of Scripture is crucial to a baby church plant because, as I explained to my son last night, "If we want to move on to plant other churches, we must make sure this church is strong first and able to stand on its own. And if we want this church to stand on its own, it must be able to pay its own pastor."

We are reticent to preach on this topic for two major reasons:

• the prosperity gospel and
• the people's poverty

The prosperity gospel has burned over much of southern Africa. False pastors, syncretistic churches, and money-making miracle crusades are everywhere in Africa--copying to the extreme the abuses they see on TBN. Every one of those pastors preaches weekly about the tithe or makes big ordeals out of the collection of the offerings and rewards big givers through promises or status symbols. The church is big business over here. In fact, so many of the other churches are like that that we and our church members  simply describe them as "money churches." Thus an obvious, major difference between our church and the prosperity churches is that we DON'T talk a lot about money.

So we feel we must avoid those topics so as to not be joined in a group we consider heretical and detrimental to the Gospel; and when we do address the giving of church members, we sometimes feel that we have to add a lot of disclaimers to enumerate the differences between what we're preaching and what they say.

Poverty is obviously another big problem. How can they be expected to support their pastors when they have barely enough to live on? Would we want to live on that much?

The issue of poverty is complicated by the centuries of vast amounts of aid Africa has received through the years. The Africans get so MUCH welfare and yet seem to feel that it's not enough. So it might not occur to them to live sacrificially and plan a budget in order to pay their pastor. After all, so many needs are met from outside them. Why would this need be met from within them?

So one of the questions Seth asked the church yesterday in his sermon was, "If a church can't support its pastor, is it sinning?" What do you think? Tough question. The answer could certainly be yes; but it could possibly be no as well, if the church were too poor to support its pastor yet tried wholeheartedly to support him more than they supported self-comforts.

There are so many other questions that can be included in this issue. For example, should our poor, small church try to support us with whatever finances they can? At first I said no, because we are church planting missionaries, which is not the same thing as a pastor. But my husband reminded me that the apostle Paul was also a missionary when he assumed the Corinthians should support him.

Please pray for your church planting missionaries around the world, because they cannot leave their churches and begin new works until the churches are selfish, meaning that they have the "Three Selfs":

• Self-supporting
• Self-governing
• Self-propagating

and supporting their pastor includes two of those points. We need a change in their cultures and worldviews to allow for sacrificial giving to their pastor (and to missions). At times this seems like an impossible task indeed, but God can do what seems impossible!

Y'All Look Alike!

Friday night, my husband was letting a church member out of our gate and locking it up for the night, when a man driving our teammate's pick-up truck drove up to our gate and repeatedly shouted in Tsonga, "Where's my canopy??"

Huh???

Once again, it was a case of mistaken identity. Though we've lived here a bit longer than our teammates in another less-central village 10 minutes down a tar road that connects a seemingly endless string of villages, our teammates are by far the better known family around here. Their house is in a much more visible place in their village on a main thoroughfare that leads to two other villages. We confused the Tsongas even more by each having four children in rapid succession, each having the same exact pick-up, and even looking somewhat similar. And of course, we both speak the language.

So our teammates recently bought a new car, sold their pick-up identical to ours, and the buyer wanted the canopy for the bed of the pick-up. He's from a whole 'nuther string of villages somewhere else, so he drove out here and asked someone where the white guy lived. He was directed to our house. Our bewilderment was visibly funny when he shouted at us for his canopy!

Anyway, it didn't take long for us to figure out what had happened. We're used to this confusion. People constantly shout our teammate's name at us as we pass in the truck, asking for lifts back to their (and his) village. Seth goes to the local hardware shop and gets called by our teammate's name. He rarely tries to correct them, as listening skills are not generally a strong point of this culture.

If they listen long enough to understand that there are, oddly enough, two white families in this sea of chocolate out here, they usually laugh a bit chagrined: "Oh, I thought you were him. There's another white person?"

"Yes," we respond. "Don't worry. We know: all white people look alike."

Outburst of laughter and quick agreement! "Yes," they agree, "White people all look alike." Then they might flick their nose to show the offending member which causes confusion. You know, we all have sharp-tipped noses...

We tease them back. "What? You only have to remember one or two white people. Look at all of you we have to keep straight!"

Can you tell these pretty girls apart?

I remember getting confused back when I was a teenager ministering on my church's bus route. Many of those little black girls with their adorable beaded braids looked the same to me. Now I can tell the Africans apart even if, for example, a woman wearing a hairpiece tells me her full name one day, and comes to church the next day without the hairpiece and uses her nickname. ;) I can kind-of tell when someone's from Zimbabwe versus South Africa, and it's even easier to pick an Ethiopian or Somalian out of a crowd. (There is a small Somalian community here.) Seth's better at that than me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share the funny thought that if you've ever looked at a people group (Africans, Koreans, whatever) and gotten mixed up because to you they all look the same--they think the same thing about you!

Border-Hopping with the Boers

"Don't let your kids walk alone down to the river behind the house. There might be crocodiles." I laughed inwardly at how strange it was to hear such a statement. It reminded me of South Africa's incredible diversity. Cities host huge malls selling iPads and iPhones, but rural areas host rivers with crocodiles.

Boer is Afrikaans for "farmer." Many of the Dutch settlers in South Africa were farmers, and many Boers still farm around the country. With some, it's more of a hobby than their main occupation, as in the case of our friends, whose farm we recently visited for a day.

A chameleon!

Another difference between Boer and American farms is that the Afrikaners just say "farm" to mean either a "game farm" or an agricultural farm. When I picture a farm, I picture cultivated fields growing green stuff, with a barn and some cows, etc. But many farms here look like completely untouched land. That's because they are game farms, or perhaps what we would call a ranch. Our friends had a game farm.

I thought their farm was near to Louis Trichardt, the closest town to our village (a half hour away). Actually their farm bordered Zimbabwe! We drove to Musina, the border town, and then drove east for another hour, an almost 3-hour drive in total.

Grilling wors in the outdoors.

After a dinner of "boerewors" (farmer's sausage), salad, and "crisps" (chips), the two older boys got to go on a "night drive" with their dad and the farmer, while I stayed back with the littles. Afrikaners make amazing salads. You might think a salad usually has a lettuce base; but a salad here can mean any vegetable combination with some sort of dressing (and that's usually straight flavored vinegar, not some fancy concoction). In the past I would have turned my nose up at a salad with cooked peas, corn, and tiny tomatoes in a grape vinegar dressing; but I have learned that Afrikaners have a magic touch when it comes to salads. No matter how unthinkable the combination might be to you, just trust that it'll be good.

I later read the label on the vinegar bottle. It read, "Great for salads, pickling, and marinades." Unfortunately, it performed the middle description on my stomach. My stomach felt pickled all night. I finally drifted off to sleep in an air-conditioned room. (Back home "across the mountain," I'd been cuddling up under thick blankets to stave off the approaching winter cold.) Here near the border it was noticeably warmer.

The biggest millipede I've ever seen.

The following morning we ate a stout, homemade Boer breakfast and took a drive around the farm with our hosts. Their farm borders two major rivers in our province, the Nzhelele (which they confidently mispronounced with no pretensions at trying to pronounce it the African way--another humorous mark of the stereotypical Afrikaner--not so PC) and the Limpopo River, which our province is named for, and which delineates the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe and between South Africa and Mozambique.

"We're going to the dam first," they informed us. I'm picturing a governmentally-built affair and was shocked to hear that they built it! We affectionately coined an acronym for this Boer spirit--ACF: Afrikaner Confidence Factor. They have such a can-do "Make-a-Plan" (a common phrase) spirit that they will often give you tidbits of dogmatic advice or information that leave your head whirling with incredulity.

So we put our own protective filter on their unscreened confidence--the ACF. If they had told me on my hypothetical farm to just build my own dam, I would have laughed it off as extraordinary overconfidence. Yeah, right! Like you could build your own dam. But I saw it with my own eyes. And my son fell in it with his own feet. *glare* We were amazed and pleased to know such resourceful, able people. And if you express amazement, they will act like it's nothing. "It took about 1,000 bags of cement," they inform us.

The homemade dam. Colin is already wearing his jacket after his trip-and-drip. He didn't fall off the dam wall, but down by the pipes.

We also visited the little "houseboat" they built themselves. They are used to swimming in that river. Although crocs can be a danger, they weren't plentiful in the Nzhelele; until some months ago a crocodile farm upstream flooded due to lots of rain this year. About 5,000 crocs just swam right out of their farm and now inhabit the rivers. The farm only recovered some hundreds of them.

Our friend took his rifle everywhere with him. He hoped to shoot a buck for meat to sell (they tell me they don't shoot the females here), as well as a large crocodile the workers had sighted several times sunning itself in front of a water pump. We didn't see any crocs, but I had trouble sleeping Tuesday night because of my imagination running away with me. Most of you know we have our own crocodile history with our teammate being attacked several years ago.

The homemade dam allows more water for their game; they had several varieties of deer--impala, nyala, kudu, eland--and giraffe. When the giraffe gets old (about 15 years old), it loses its teeth. When all the teeth are gone, it starves to death. So before that happens, the Boers, for about $1,500, give the pleasure of shooting game and having a stuffed giraffe's head on his study wall to a foreign hunter. This is the kind of elite hunting common in Europe. Americans should be thankful for their sportsmen culture and freedom to hunt, as we discovered recently when watching this documentary (free online for a limited time).

As we drove around the farm, I asked the Mrs. why her husband had mentioned the night before needing to make their presence known on the farm. She told me of two more real dangers than crocs that they regularly face.

• Poachers: the farm has many acres and little surveillance. When they tried to set up a camera to see what was happening, it was stolen. Poachers come in and kill the deer. Sometimes they find the animals tied with a wire around its neck to a tree, choked to death. Sometimes there is no sign. Animals are simply missing, decreasing in number.
• Smugglers: "Drugs?" I asked. Yes, drugs, but it's usually cigarettes, which are highly taxed here. If they can smuggle them across the border, the taxes are avoided; and they can get way more profit. Once they saw four vehicles full of men cutting across their property which they knew were either the poachers or smugglers, but they were only two people with one rifle between them, and so didn't attempt to stop them.

I knew how many Zimbabweans had fled into South Africa in the past decade because of their dictatorial, mad president who impoverished Zimbabwe, making it the third poorest country in the world at the time, and how many were in our village a few hours away. I wondered if they had seen several crossing through their land. They confirmed that there were many. Even their current workers sneaked across the border a few years ago, fording the crocodile-infested rivers with their few belongings on their heads and coming through the easily accessed fences on their farm.

"Wasn't there a border patrol?" I wondered. They chuckled. No. There were occasional police watching the borders; but they can't be everywhere, and worse than that, they are so corrupt that they let anyone go with a bribe. The border patrol is no help to the Boers with Zimbabweans crossing the farm illegally, whether poachers, smugglers, or refugees.

This we did next ourselves! We had traversed the farm, noticing game (our friend tried to hunt a few, but didn't get any good shots), huge yellow and black spiders hanging in webs across the dirt-track road, and losing my son's shirt which Seth had placed on top of the truck to dry from his earlier accidental dip in the dam, finally arriving at the Limpopo River which forms the other border to their farm. We turned onto a track that followed the border fence.

Border-hopping.

There was a small strip of "no-man's land" between South Africa's mesh wire fence and Zimbabwe's. The Limpopo was just beyond the Zimbabwean fence. At first the border fence was a decent fence with barbed wire on top; but it quickly deteriorated as we drove, until we came to a place with no fence at all. Two gates, one in each country's fence, were both open with no pretense at all at keeping anything from passing between one and the other. This is where many people border-hop without needing the proper papers. We ourselves walked right through and visited the Limpopo River.

It was deserted, but our friend told us that on the weekends it is full of people fishing and...border-hopping. It was beautiful and a little bit thrilling to be able to visit such a historic landmark without needing to go through the happiness-destroying process of having passports stamped. We skipped rocks for a bit, snapped a picture, and headed back to the farm.

Limpopo River

Don't mess with Mom!

The evidence!

On the way back to the farmhouse, Seth got the chance to shoot the rifle at an empty water bottle. He hit it several times. They asked if I wanted a turn. I'd only ever shot at a Christian camp once or twice. The rifle had scopes on the top, but it was a heavy piece of work. I accidentally touched the tip, still hot from Seth's firing. They threw another water bottle closer than Seth's had been. It took me a bit to focus through the scopes, but the scopes and cross-hairs made it easy to sight the target. I shot twice and made two holes in my bottle! They said I could be a sniper, but I demurred that if the target were moving, that would make a difference. :)

Swinging on vines.

There are several disadvantages to being a missionary kid, Seth and I discussed on the way home, but there are certain pleasing advantages as well. I was glad for the children to see normal use of a firearm, the great rivers of our area, wild game, and gain a broader international knowledge of how our world works today, with some of the interesting challenges to running a farm on the border of South Africa and Zimbabwe.