A Story to Tell

Now here’s a story worth telling. I tell you what, what and adventure. Check this...
So in November, I know that’s going back a ways, but here’s what we did; we met as a team to decide where we would be going in South Africa and asked God to show us the locations. We left the north east, mid west and south west of the country. Now on the leadership side of things we spent time trying to make contacts in regards to these locations can found this place called Upington. Furthermore we were told that there were a number of groups that we could hook up with. Now, unfortunately that is literally the last thing that we heard in regards to this portion of the outreach. That last word came in around early December.

Now let us fast forward to the end of our time in White river which brings us to the end of February. Well we still have no contacts or idea of what we’ll be doing or even where we will be sleeping. And yet, each member of the team still had peace about going, so we bought the tickets. Of course through this time we were not just sitting around waiting for contacts to drop into our laps, but talking to people we were with, making phone calls which would gives us another phone number so on and so forth until the newest phone number didn’t exist.
We tried traveler’s guides and internet to find accommodation and guests houses but to no avail; nothing that would fit our budget.

So, as I said we bought our bus tickets and climbed on the bus not knowing what was waiting for us. When we arrived it was about an hour before sunset, and had to find a place to stay for the night. Now we split into group and went around to see what we could find. Myself, I stayed with the bags to keep them safe. The team came back forty-five minutes later having found a receptionist at a guest house who called around to people that she knew and found us a place to stay at a different guest house for way under our budget. Not only did we find the place, but the owners even came to pick us up. WOW.

That’s not even the end of the story. A couple of days later we’ve got new friends from a church nearby who want us to hang out all the time, a school who would like us to come and present to the students, some social workers who were more than happy to have us come along and run some events in the townships with the kids. And by the end of the week we even had a place to stay totally free of charge, with food. What an awesome blessing eh?

This portion of the outreach was by far the favourite two weeks of the program. Probably in relation to that, this is where we saw the most growth in people and where members of the team were willing to step out and try new things, sharing with other people on the street, or in front of a large audience, or sharing on the fly without any sort of preparation.

We all really enjoyed it and I even got to play rugby while I was there...good times.

Matt Clarke
Go Big or Go Home!