Let Him break your heart.

I can’t believe Wednesday is already over. Today had it’s ups and downs. I’ll start with the ups. My boy Chrispin, the one we prayed for yesterday, had a great improvement. He jumped off the bus smiling and had a good attitude all day and then at the end he even ran up to the AV table to volunteer to pray to close out camp for everybody there. How awesome! Although he didn’t actually get to pray because somebody else beat him to it, but just the fact that he wanted to volunteer was amazing.

Ok so now some hard things. I was talking to Gracious during his one on one time and I asked him if he goes to church and he said yes that he goes to Jehovah’s Witness church. Now before coming here I wasn’t too familiar with what that means, but some key points are that they don’t believe in the trinity and they believe that it’s all about good works. Well I then decided to ask Gracious if he talks to his family about what he learns at camp and then he just started going off in Nyanja and finally my partner explained to me that Gracious doesn’t believe he will go to Heaven that they will just go back to the grave because that is where he came from. Hearing this just broke my heart. I mean if you meet Gracious he just the most precious boy you will ever lay eyes on. So after me trying to explain it to him it just wasn’t getting through so tomorrow morning the pastor is going to go through salvation and what it means to have Jesus in your heart. Hopefully if a wiser Zambian is explaining it to him that it will sink in. But it’s going to be hard especially since his whole family goes to this church and believes in it. So just be praying for that whole situation.

Today we had the infamous talk. We started out talking about how God created each thing with a specific design. And then how God created so many good things for us to enjoy including sex, but then the devil perverted it. That talk led into an HIV/AIDS talk and I did an example with some tootsie rolls. I gave them each one in the morning and I said don’t eat this sweet. The sweet represented the act of sex and it’s a gift from God. He tells us to hold on to it and keep it pure until his perfect timing (aka marriage). So if they kept the sweet all day then they would be rewarded at the end. So the day went on and at the end I asked them to pull out their sweet and 3 of them had already eaten it. If they ate it already that meant in the representation that they have had sex before marriage. So if they waited then they were rewarded with another sweet, but if they ate it I wanted to reiterate the fact that God is a gracious God and He forgives us our sins and tomorrow they will get a sweet. So anyways then we went on to talk about respecting others and I went through a few scriptures for them. Then for lunch we went and served a group of girls lunch and it was the greatest experience! I think my boys really got a lot out of it.

After camp today we got to go tour a CRC (Community Resource Center) and a LCA (Lifeway Christian Academy) which was by far the greatest thing in the world. There were so many kids there just waiting for us and we played with them and hugged them. I mean lets be honest I could have stayed there forever. I really wanted to sneak a kid on the bus.

Tomorrow is shoe day. Be praying for us because we have a mixture of real shoes and crocs. Sometimes the kids just expect shoes instead of seeing it for what they are. A gift from God. So the ones who end up with crocs aren’t very happy. Prayers are definitely needed so that all goes well.

Dinner tonight was the best food EVER. It was taco soup and cornbread and avocados! I was pretty much in Heaven. During testimony time we really got into talking about just how our hearts just break for the kids here and that’s something that is just so important. God wants our hearts to break for these kids because His heart breaks for these kids. These are His children and the things that they go through and the things that they see isn’t the way He intended it. He brought us here to see the hurt and the pain in their eyes. He brought us here to break our hearts.