The Love of Africa

I would like to share with you my journal entry from tonight.

...I was on my way home after putting in about 7 hours at church today and I just started praying over different people and things. I was just talking to God. I started praying for divine appointments and I can't rememver how but it led to me wishing I would have told Josslyn Kenner that I love her at Reality last night. Reality is the youth event we do every Wednesday night. When she was leaving, she said bye to me and I heard in my head to tell her I loved her, but before it could register I had already said the plain word bye and she was gone. I got to thinking about that while I was praying today and I wondered why I don't tell these kids at Reality how much I love them. In Africa we would tell kids all the time that we loved them, we'd also tell them God loves them. Why don't I say it now? I got to thinking about it. In Naynja, the Zambian language, the phrases "I Love you" and God Loves you" were about all I knew how to say. I barely knew any phrases or words other than those two. That's when it clicked, that's all God want from us. He wants us to share our love and His love like it's all we know how to do. It was so easy to share the love of God with the children in Africa because it was the only thing we knew how to do in their culture. We were created to love, the Bible says in Mark 12:30-31
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is like this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these."
Those were the words of Jesus, we are to do two things with our lives. Love the Lord our God, and love those around us. It's what we were made for! I need to get in a mindset of Africa where the only way I know how to communicate to people around me is through acts of love and kindness. I may be back in America, but I am still in a foreign land. I do not belong to this world, my eyes are set on things above.

Meet Kennedy. I had the honor of having this young man of God in my group when we did a week long camp with the orphans in Zambia. Kennedy is a double orphan and is battling sickness, yet he has faith that would put many American "Christians" to shame. There are so many kids in Zambia, like Kennedy, who have a deep passion for the gospel and for Jesus Christ. There was one night in particular where God showed His power and how he can use anyone of any age to bring Him glory. We had several of our missionaries who had gotten seriously sick, we had been praying over them for a while and we started to hear singing and crying coming from the other side of the orphanage. We were so touched by what we thought the cries were. We thought the "mamma's" (the women who take care of the children in the orphanage) had been praying for us. After our sick had been healed through both our prayers and theirs, we went to join the mamma's in praising the Lord. When we got over to them, we suddenly realized, it wasn't just the mamma's it was the children too. There were kids five years old on their face crying out to God. We were all so moved by the passion that the children have for the Lord.