Are you ready to be poured out as an offering?

 

Each morning Ian and I start our day with a cup of Peet’s Major Dickason’s coffee (thank you Julie and Pete Wilkerson for that reco) and have our quiet time looking over the farm. We typically read Oswald Chambers My Utmost for His Highest and then move on to scripture.  Today was no different, except that the farm had disappeared as a cloud settled into the valley.

I chuckled as I read the title of today’s message as it said, “Are You Ready To Be Poured Out As an Offering?”  Pouring is something that we have been dealing with for two full weeks now – pouring rain. Cyclone Eloise made her way to us on Sunday, January 23rd and the rivers across the country flooded. Our dams filled to overflowing and then kept flowing. The bridge that we cross to drive to town has only been passable twice since the rains hit, and not in the past week. That means no one can come to us, including half of our workers who live on the other side of that bridge. There is a back way to town, but it’s a long drive on a really bad road, over a mountain that is always washed out. You have to have a high vehicle, 4-wheel drive is recommended and courage to make that trip, especially if it’s raining (which it is forecasted to do for another 13 days).

 

The bridge on a normal day.

The bridge this morning (or should I say the river?)

 

We had a day of sunshine and extreme heat yesterday (sauna-like), which helped the muddy roads start to dry out. We had a nice visit with our long-term volunteers by the fire last night and just as they left the rains began to pour again.

Back to Oswald’s message today. Here is what he wrote:

Are you ready to be poured out as an offering? It is an act of your will, not your emotions. Tell God you are ready to be offered as a sacrifice for Him. Then accept the consequences as they come, without any complaints, in spite of what God may send your way. God sends you through a crisis in private, where no other person can help you. From the outside your life may appear to be the same, but the difference is taking place in your will. Once you have experienced the crisis in your will, you will take no thought of the cost when it begins to affect you externally. If you don’t deal with God on the level of your will first, the result will be only to arouse sympathy for yourself.

“Bind the sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar” (Psalm 118:27). You must be willing to be placed on the altar and go through the fire; willing to experience what the altar represents— burning, purification, and separation for only one purpose— the elimination of every desire and affection not grounded in or directed toward God. But you don’t eliminate it, God does. You “bind the sacrifice…to the horns of the altar” and see to it that you don’t wallow in self-pity once the fire begins. After you have gone through the fire, there will be nothing that will be able to trouble or depress you. When another crisis arises, you will realize that things cannot touch you as they used to do. What fire lies ahead in your life?

Tell God you are ready to be poured out as an offering, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever dreamed He would be.

Friends, please go back and read that again. I have read it and re-read it because I love the promise that it makes. And we are living proof of that promise being true. Yes, He might move you to Africa and yes you might have to go through fire and rain and drought and flood and death and disease, but you will also experience joy and laughter and love and peace and contentment and hope that is never-ending. Who doesn’t want that?

Speaking of hope, February is child sponsorship month at Heart for Africa.  Will you sponsor one of our 275 children who now have a life filled with hope because they have been brought to Project Canaan – a place of HOPE?

To sponsor a child in Canada please click here.

To sponsor a child in the U.S. please click here.

Thank you for helping us bring hope to the nation of Eswatini. We all really need it right now.

Live from Eswatini … thankful for the good days and the hard days.

Janine

PS - we still need a few rain boots and rain ponchos for the February container. Please check out our amazon wish list at http://bit.ly/raingearforpckids. Thanks!

Never-ending rain, another pit latrine baby and an intervention of sorts

Swaziland is in a 20-year drought.  Both our dams were dry last week.  Very few people in the country had any kind of successful harvest last year and ours was down 65% vs. the year before … all because of weather (lack of water mostly, but also wind).  Water is life and we can’t make it rain, only HE can.

In Swaziland we don’t have “summer” and “winter” we have “rainy season” and “dry season”.  The rainy season starts at the end of October and goes until March.  Last year we had virtually no rain, which leaves us with no water to irrigate crops during the dry season as we had hoped and planned.

This is usually a small bridge - we cross over it to get home

Dam #2 is starting to fill!

We have been praying for rain (which seems a bit senseless during the already dry season because it would be out of season to get rain).  It has only rained once since we moved here on June 1^st and that was the day that our friends from the International Egg Commission and the American Egg Board stepped foot on Project Canaan in August (a “lucky” and much appreciated gesture).  When we arrived back from the US on Tuesday at 2PM the rains started as we were unpacking the car (not that our arrival had anything to do with it, but that is how I know when it started because I got wet!).  It is now Saturday morning and the rains continue to pour, the ground is saturated and the runoff from the hills around us is starting to fill both our dams.  We are thankful, but we are also stuck … literally.  There has been 6 feet of water rise up and now covers the bridge that we use to get to town (office, school, gas station, grocery store, airport, hospitals … you get my point, eh?).  I am glad that I have a fully stocked pantry, tetra milk for my coffee and matches in case the power goes out.

Many people around the world have been praying for rain and it has come without ceasing. Be careful what you pray for – you just might get it!

Baby Joy arriving home.

Okay, on to our new bundle of joy.  Yes, her name is “Joy” and she came to us on Tuesday at the tender age of ten days.  She was dropped in a pit latrine (outhouse/toilet) when she was born and thankfully someone heard her cry and climbed down in to get her out.  She was immediately taken to the police and hospital to be cared for while an investigation took place.  As you might guess, the mother was found and is now in prison for attempting to kill her baby. Same story, different faces.  Joy is a beautiful baby and we are thankful for our fourth little girl.  We have eight boys and now the ratio is a solid two to one.

On Thursday I spent the day with Gcabile (one of our wonderful caregivers at El Roi) and Robert Smucker (volunteer extraordinaire) trying to have an intervention of sorts and get ahead of the problem of baby dumping.  We know that Emmanuel’s16-year-old mother is almost ready to give birth to her third child, (Emmanuel lives at El Roi and is 13 months old).  The mother is HIV positive and sometimes lives in a bus shelter.  She does not want the baby in her belly and we fear that she will give birth and “dump it”, just like Joy’s mother did.  So we spent the day with her, trying to encourage her to get pre-natal medical care and promise to go to see our wonderful doctor friend at the hospital when labor begins.  But she is afraid of hospitals (both of her first two children were born in someone else’s home because she had been kicked out of her family homestead for her bad behavior=pregnancy).  She is also very young, mentally unstable and is refusing to take live-saving Anti-retro-virals so this was a very difficult day for us all.

In the end, after a short, but unsuccessful visit to the hospital we were able to negotiate “plan B”.  Gcabile’s sister-in-law kindly agreed to allow this young girl to live with them until the baby is born.  I don’t know many people who would offer that to a stranger, do you?

Emmanuel and his mom.

There were times on Thursday that I found myself asking myself if I was helping her only because she had asked that her baby would be able to go to live at El Roi?  And the answer is complicated.  Yes and no.  I would want to help her either way, but sometimes helping is hard to do and people have to want to be helped (and have the capacity to accept help) in order to be helped.  The flip side is thinking about a newborn baby being left in a ditch or on the side of a road or in a filthy, bacteria filled pit latrine.  Wouldn’t you want to get ahead of it if you could?  We will accept her baby (if she still decides she doesn’t want him/her) whether she has dumped him or not, but I would rather give her the choice of making a healthy decision rather than one that will haunt her the rest of her life, which won’t be long if she continues in this lifestyle and without ARV’s. 

This was such an encouraging week to everyone who is living here at Project Canaan.  God’s love, His provision, His promises were seen and felt every minute of the day (even when scooping after our 5 dogs who don’t like the rain and really like our front patio to do their business).  He is faithful, He is Holy, He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and His plans are perfect, but they rarely look like our plans. 

Thank you all for continuing to read this blog. I am truly overwhelmed by the comments I get (most of them positive so far J ) and to know that so many people are praying with us and for us here at Project Canaan. 

Live from Swaziland … we are thinking of building a raft (or ark!)!

Janine