Welcome APU!
Rebekah, Gabby, Melody, Rachael and Madi
We would like to say a massive welcome to our team from Azuza Pacific University in California. They have been with us for 2 weeks and have gotten well and truly stuck into their work so far.
Here is a blog post from Madi about what they got up to yesterday,
Today we went to El Sheddai which is a ministry just outside of George that opens its doors to people who have reached the end of themselves and are searching for the next step. Their mission is to provide a place for people to come and experience the love of Christ and get back on their feet. The head of this organization is a guy named Richard and he was who we met first today. They had us introduce ourselves and say a little bit about who we are and where we’re from and then we got the day started. El Sheddai is located on a farm and they are very determined to become self-sustaining so that they will be able to take in more people and provide work for them. We began the day helping clean out the chickens pens that they have. They currently have just over 100 chickens, but their goal is to have 10,000 eventually. It was a very different experience for us and it pushed us to challenge what we see as the norm for everyday life. These chickens are a huge part of this ministry working and we were glad to be able to come alongside them and help them.
After the chickens we helped them fertilize a piece of their land as well as help them transfer some waste that they needed moved. It was very tasking but once we were finished, they kept thanking us for how much it meant to them. It would have taken them much much longer to do what we all did and that was great to know that we could take that load off of them. One of the men that was working with us kept telling us to slow down and be patient with the work. This was foreign to us and we had a goal to just get it done but we had to adjust our thinking and our work ethic in order to be respectful of them. They run on a different speed than we have been used to and at first it was annoying to slow down but it eventually clicked for us because we realized just how fast we’d been working and how fast we didn’t need to be going. He wanted us to enjoy the wind and the sun and once we started doing that, the work wasn’t so daunting. We did eventually get it done but we did it “in God’s time” as Shane referred to it. At the end of the day we had a devotional time with Richard. He shared some very valuable wisdom with us and it was a great end to a tiresome day. God is doing incredible things through Richard and the other staff there. Opening a door to anyone and everyone who has reached the end of themselves and looking for something to grasp onto is not an easy task, but he knows that is where God called him and he is
changing lives because of it. We get to go back tomorrow and we are extremely excited. They are incredible people and have challenged out ways of life in only one day.
We are loving being here, meeting tons of new people, seeing the beautiful land, and experiencing God in new ways everyday. We are so excited to see what is to come over the few weeks and are continually praying that God open our eyes to what He’d want us to see and learn. Thursday we go back to Blanco, a township, and get to reconnect with
the people we met last week. It is going to be good to see familiar faces and continue to help where we can!
