Jesus in the Mozambique Bush

We have been doing great in Pemba! God is blessing us with great fellowship, beautiful scenery, and His presence 24/7! Each day we realize this is the place God wants us to be and how blessed we are to be here. The weekend before this was a weekend of rest for us, but this weekend was filled with challenges, prayer, and Jesus as we went to evangelize in the Mozambique bush.

     We left for bush outreach on Thursday at 15:00. As we started everyone on our team, about 40 people of Mozambique and International background, was excited and ready to share the good news of Jesus to the poor and lost. However our initial travel time of 3 hours quickly passed and we were still not in the village where we were meant to be. After 6 hours of travel, including a stop for the bathroom on the side of the road, a stop to get a tire fixed, and a stop to get food, we arrived! Everyone stumbled out of the cameon into the dark village and we started to set up camp. 

Setting up all the tents in the dark is challenging, but it looked great once we woke up!

After a long drive it usually takes the team a little while to wake up and leave their tents. In Mozambique, the villagers wake up as soon as the sun starts to rise at 5:00 am! They start cooking, or taking care of their children so it gets too noisy to sleep. When we finally climbed out of our tent we were greeted by all these beautiful faces! The village children rarely get to see outsiders and they get so excited when Iris teams come to evangelize. After breakfast the team split and half of the people went to do baptisms, and the other half stayed back to help with the children's program. The children get to sing songs, play games, and receive a piece of chocolate! They really look forward to this part of the day.

There were 13 people baptized into the name of Jesus, and there was much rejoicing! It was a magical moment to see these beautiful brothers and sisters in Christ come out of the water in complete freedom from their past lives. Consciously choosing to dedicate their entire lives to live for Jesus. 

After this everyone gathered together for a Mozambiquan lunch of rice and beans. It was a very relaxing afternoon and we were able to watch and interact with the villagers and the pastors. It was humbling to see how simply they live and how they don't have the same worries as most people do. They have to walk around 5 miles each time they need water, they need to either farm or raise livestock to eat, and they have to make clothing to cover themselves. Very few village children ever go to school, so they continue to live as their parent s do when they get older. The saddest part is very few of these villagers have ever heard the name of Jesus. They don't feel the presence of our living God, they don't experience the miracles done through the power of the Holy Spirit, and they don't know about the love of Jesus. Thankfully after lunch and rest our team went out to houses all around the village to spread the gospel of Jesus! Over 20 people gave up their old beliefs to live a new life with Jesus, many people were healed of sickness, and many more were blessed to be reminded of the love of God. Every person we encountered we invited to our big evangelism night, where we would show the Jesus film, do a skit, share testimonies, preach, and pray for anyone who came. 

     When we left we were dirty, tired, and completely satisfied with what God did for those people. We had another long journey back to the Iris base due to another cameon breakdown, but we made it home that night none the less. It was amazing to see God moving for the people, but we were also beyond blessed to be a part of that team. The students who came with us were so fantastic and never complained once! We cannot thank God enough for blessing us in all the ways He did that weekend. 

This is our beautiful team from all over the world and Mozambique!

Love and blessings from the Reckless team! 

Finally in Africa!

Howdy!

First off we need to apologize for the lack of communication; there have been numerous things happening since we left Colombia, and it’s been a whirlwind for us! 

After Reckless Ministries left Colombia and returned to the United States, we were pondering God’s plan. We were slightly confused, but trusting in God to provide a place to live and a temporary job while we waited in transition. We felt God leading us to live in West Texas, and work as substitute teachers. He was already providing everything we needed! As we settled into our new living quarters we knew God would bless the city and the people we encountered. Soon after starting our jobs we were blessed to pray for a few of the kids and other teachers. God began moving powerfully in the schools! We were able to pray for whole classrooms to feel the presence of God, and many of the students came to know Jesus! Halleluiah! Even though God was doing amazing things, the persecution still came like Jesus promised it would. However we were blessed with no major consequences from our sharing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! During this time of teaching He also began showing us what our next step was going to be. 

Because we are missionaries called to the ends of the world, we knew our time in the United States was temporary. We continued to pray and seek God out of our great love for Him waiting for Him to speak about our next step. He did not disappoint! One night God spoke in a dream to us that we were supposed to go back to Africa and staff the Harvest School of Missions. Honestly we were more shocked than excited, because when we left Africa one year ago our thoughts were, “we are never coming back.” Our minds and hearts were focused on our call to Colombia; believing we were going to be there longer than we actually were. Thankfully God has His beautiful ways of changing hearts! After praying more and only receiving confirmation after confirmation, we applied to become staff members for Harvest School 22. We were accepted and we were going back to Africa! 

This is where the craziness began. We only had 4 weeks to prepare to go back to Africa, which meant in four weeks we had to move all of our stuff again, pack, apply for visas, receive visas, book plane tickets, and travel to say goodbye to some of our family. There were many challenges to this, but the biggest one was getting our visas for Africa and Indian. Due to a late letter of invitation we could not send out for our African visa until 2 and ½ weeks out. This posed a problem because processing time is very long and the embassy is only open a few days a week. Add that with every other American student sending in their visa application and you have a long wait. To further complicate things one visa got sent back so there was a scramble to send it in again with prayers for a speedy processing. When both African visas finally arrived, we rushed down to Houston to get our Indian visas. Praise God it only took us one day to get them! Even with the blessing from God we still had to push our flights back a couple of days. So ending our time in the United States we waved good bye to our families one last time and boarded our flight, looking forward to our next great God adventure.

Arriving in Africa we felt completely normal, minus a few hours of sleep, but it was like we had never left. Back on the base we were given our room, an upgrade from last year praise God! Then the work started. We had staff meetings every morning, and we were kept busy getting the base ready for students to arrive. We saw what actually went on in the background when we were students, and it gave us a greater appreciation for our positions. We are still getting into the flow of things here, because things change quite frequently, and we are still new staff. God is being so merciful and good to us and we are beyond excited to see how these next 10 weeks go! God bless you guys and thank you for keeping up with us! More blog posts to come! 

Love,

The Reckless team