Great Is Thy Faithfulness

Well, it’s been one month exactly. One month since I left America and landed on the South African soil. I am half way through my six-week school semester. Papers and projects have come and gone (although there are many that lay ahead), friendships have begun to form, and many memories have already been made. One of the highlights of my time here thus far happened this past Friday, September 30, when my Intercultural Communication class went and visited our teacher’s other school where she works called University Bible Institute. It is a Bible college for students (mostly from Southern Africa) who want to be pastors or in some kind of ministry after they graduate. We arrived at the school on Friday morning just in time for their chapel. Our class prepared a song (in Zulu, mind you) to sing as went up to the stage and was introduced by Mama Patrick (our teacher) to the students at UBI.

Once the service was over, we observed/played a game of Cricket on their soccer (or football) field. At this time, the students were busy with their studies, so we were separated from them. At lunchtime, the opportunity finally came to “cross culturally communicate.” I met one woman who was 36 and completing her degree at UBI, and the next student I met was a 19-year-old boy who was in his second year at the school. After lunch (which was apparently finger food, but so NOT finger food unless you consider coleslaw and sautéed vegetables to be easily consumable dishes without a fork…Intercultural communication challenge #1- CHECK!) we headed back into the chapel where we played a couple of games, sang, and danced. In the first game we played, one of the faculty members at UBI would ask us questions about life that ranged from silly to serious, and if our answer to the question was yes, we stood up and came to the middle of the room. The highlight of that game, most definitely, came when they asked if there were any “only children” in the room. I immediately got up from my seat on the perimeter of the circle and ran to the middle. I was the ONLY ONE! (Don’t worry, Mom and Dad, you know I love being your one and only.)

After the game, some of the UBI students shared their Zulu dancing skills and then we shared our line dancing and Cupid Shuffle skills (our electric slide and heel clicking moves were definitely not as cool as their African foot kicking tricks). As the afternoon came to a close, my new 19-year-old friend, Cuzzy, got up suddenly and sang a song. Boy, was it beautiful, and then, at the end of his song my teacher said my name into the microphone and before I knew it, “Mi-sha, Mi-sha” was being chanted all across the room. (You can see all this in the videos posted below, by the way!) I got up from my seat on the side, went to the piano, and introduced my Aaronic Benediction (I’m pretty sure their favorite part of it was the Hebrew, by the way). Once I was finished singing, we gave a word of thanks to the Bible college for having us, exchanged information with our new friends, and headed off. We all hope to visit UBI again before our time at AE is over.

Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon was a wild whirlwind of traveling, food, and lectures as we left AE for the weekend and visited a few key battlefields we had been learning about in our history class. We stayed at the cutest hotel in Dundee (northeast of Pietermaritzburg) on Saturday night and had an incredible meal of three different meats and three different desserts (see pictures below!). I went to bed with a happy tummy, to say the least.

As the weeks have gone by, the rhythm of life here at AE has settled in. The days continue to be long and there is a temptation to say to oneself, “O, I will get with God when the busyness dies down and I have more time to focus on spiritual things.” What a silly way to think, though. It is in the “mundane” and the “routine” that we live most of our lives. Oswald Chambers's devotionals always hit me hard, but I had to share this one with all of you from yesterday because, wherever you are in life, I am confident it will speak to your spirit in some way shape, or form, so here it is. Please read it. I promise---you will be BLESSED!!!! I put in italics and bold the parts that stood out to me most…

The Vision And The Verity

“Called to be saints.” 1 Corinthians 1:2

Thank God for the sight of all you have never yet been. You have had the vision, but you are not there yet by any means. It is when we are in the valley, where we prove whether we will be the choice ones, that most of us turn back. We are not quite prepared for the blows which must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision. We have seen what we are not, and what God wants us to be, but are we willing to have the vision "batter'd to shape and use" by God? The batterings always come in commonplace ways and through commonplace people.

There are times when we do know what God's purpose is; whether we will let the vision be turned into actual character depends upon us, not upon God. If we prefer to loll on the mount and live in the memory of the vision, we will be of no use actually in the ordinary stuff of which human life is made up. We have to learn to live in reliance on what we saw in the vision, not in ecstasies and conscious contemplation of God, but to live in actualities in the light of the vision until we get to the veritable reality. Every bit of our training is in that direction. Learn to thank God for making known His demands.

The little "I am" always sulks when God says do. Let the little "I am" be shrivelled up in God's indignation - "I AM THAT I AM hath sent thee." He must dominate. Is it not penetrating to realize that God knows where we live, and the kennels we crawl into! He will hunt us up like a lightning flash. No human being knows human beings as God does.

On Friday night, (I’m backtracking by the way) after our day at UBI, we had a miracle night, but these miracles were not necessarily about people being healed or the dead being raised. Instead, the miracles were focused on how God comes through in situations of every day life. People spoke of being healed from wrong decisions of the past, being harmed by others and learning forgiveness, having a loved one taken away, or even just mending relationships with friends and family. This was a powerful night, and we ended it with a hymn that I led from the piano called Come Thou Fount…you may have heard it before. It goes a little something like this.

“Come, thou Fount of every blessing,             

tune my heart to sing thy grace;       

streams of mercy, never ceasing,        

call for songs of loudest praise.           

Teach me some melodious sonnet,       

sung by flaming tongues above.        

Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,             

mount of God’s redeeming love.”

But my favorite verse of that song ends with these words…

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,          

prone to leave the God I love;                

here's my heart, O take and seal it, 

seal it for thy courts above.

Those words always stick with me because they are just so true. We are so prone to wander, so quickly.

Thanks be to God that He always draws us back by His making of little "miracles" in our daily lives. 

We just have to take the the time to notice these miracles for what they are...small reminders that He truly is

Immanuel--God with us...both now and forevermore. 

“His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.”

- Lam. 3:22-23

Our new friends: Cuzzy (left) and Ndumisl (right)

At the cute little hotel in Dundee with my roommate, Katie! 

On the battlefield with Bethany

The Prayer Chapel on AE's campus.

Seated across the pond from the chapel

How many prayer chapels float on the water?
 I wanted as many pictures as possible.