alpha

It is Sunday and I am sitting in the dark. All my electronics have dead batteries except the laptop and I only have an hour or so left on it. I knew we would most likely not have power and I knew I needed to plug everything in but sheer exhaustion prevented me from getting up out of bed last night to do so. We have been hosting an Alpha Conference for the past few days. The early mornings, long days and week or so of preparation have wiped me out.

Maggie Courtney-Hedrich told me about Alpha course over breakfast one morning. She pulled Nicky Gumbel’s book from the shelf and told me all about it. She told me about the impact the course had had on her life and about her church in London, Holy Trinity Brompton. I had met her friend Jessica who strongly suggested I visit The Warehouse in Cape Town, SA. Jess came to Atlanta for a wedding and the three of us spent an unforgettable weekend together in the Fall of 2010. Our conversations often went back to Alpha, HTB, Christ Church in London and in Cape Town. They had mutual friends they wanted me to meet and had connections in Africa who they knew could help me with my vision. Just a few months after Jess told me about the warehouse during a Skype conversation at Maggie’s house, I was there. In Cape Town, at the Warehouse. It happened so quickly. It turned out that the couple I have been working alongside here at Iris, also know about The Warehouse and the two connections gave me a little favor and they took me in and showed me around. While at Iris, I also met another couple who have close friends with The Warehouse as well, so the connections were endless. The Warehouse is a ministry in Cape Town who work with the poor in areas of development and plug in the church community to help do so. 

 I fell in love with Cape Town and met all sorts of amazing people, who all seemed to be loosely connected in one way or another. During all of this I was continuing to exchange emails with leaders in Iris about Alpha Course. I had been looking for a basic discipleship course that we could use to train our kids in conjunction with our hands on vocational training. Alpha is a 10 week course in Christianity 101. I wanted our kids to know who Jesus is and why He did and get their questions answered as they come to faith. About a month ago I found our that Alpha was coming here to Iris. They were sending a team of leaders from Cape Town to come and do a three day course on how to teach Alpha to our Mozambican leaders. I offered to help. I knew it to be a life-changing course and wanted to be involved. 

I offered our building as that seemed to be the biggest need and it, of course, is not even my building in the first place. It didn’t know that I would not be simply turning over my set of keys. I am learning. Our kids essentially were granted the opportunity to host the event. With Alpha leaders coming from Brazil and South AFrica, and all of our leaders gathering, we could not simply open the doors. We had no chairs, no food, no cups, no plates, no nothing. All last week we changed all of this after 3 days of shopping. Everything here closes during the most productive hours of the day and there are only so many stores. We had to pay exorbitant prices for cups and plates of cheap quality. We were given a budget which means a big paper thin envelop with a huge wad of cash in it. We rode up and down pot hole filled streets in a flat bed truck with a baby in a car seat! We jumped out at every stop and designated someone to sit with the baby and someone to go inside and get what was needed. 75 of everything. There were no “selections” or real ability to shop around and price items. You have to just get what you see and hope they have enough. But it still resulted in a dozen different stops and shops. Here is the only time and place that I abhor shopping. Shopping is usually therapeutic and recreational, not here. It is hard work. It is sweaty and my hair gets tangled when I ride in the back. Nick, the British missionary with the baby in the car seat and friends at The Warehouse, did most of the work. But I still had to be there and it made me miss IKEA. We could have knocked it out in an hour and spent a fourth of our budget. We could have been at Starbuck’s having latte’s...

I decided our students needed uniforms. I had bought a few pieces of caplana fabric a week or so ago and just pulled from that and had our students measured. I was so proud of myself for taking it to the Natete market on the scooter and negotiating with a “tailor” in the heart of a very typical African village market. His “shop” is simply a treadle sewing machine outside a mud hut. I gave him the fabric and measurements and went round and round and round in Portuguese. I drew the design of the tunics I wanted and gave him the measurements. I was crushed but not one bit surprised to collect them a few days later to discover he didn’t add any centimeters to the measurements, but did them exactly according the sizes of each child. “You Nincompoop”, I wanted to say. But I am a good missionary so I just rolled my eyes from underneath my motorcycle helmet the whole way home and thought long and hard about what I was going to do. I took the tiny shirts to the kids and we laughed hysterically when I made them all try them on anyway. All of a sudden I just knew what to do. I gave the girls the largest of the boys shirts and took the tiny short waisted shirts up to Julia in the mission school compound and left word for her to make me seven bow ties, stat. Miraculously, my sweet little boys who only own a few articles of clothing all promised me they had white dress shirts. They showed up the next morning ready for the job and Julia pinned capalana bow ties on them as they beamed. Every student jumped to attention and performed with excellence. They served tea and coffee and made bread rolls with peanut butter and jam and made long treks to the kitchen and back. They served up plates for lunch and washed and rewashed and washed again all the dishes. They carried crates of sodas back and forth and served our 80 plus guests, breakfast, snacks and lunch. They arrived at 6am and stayed until 4pm and they did this without pay for three days. I could not be more proud of them. 

After the first day, I arrived to give them their morning pep talk and told them about the difference between obeying and serving. A slave obeys his master, a president serves his country. They are all princes and princesses in my eyes and in God’s. I love seeing them serve, from their hearts, with a desire to please, in love. I want them to know they are royalty. I want to serve them with the same diligence I saw them serve with this weekend. I am so incredibly proud of them. 

And it turns out that I knew a few of the Alpha leaders from Cape Town and quickly made friends with the others. It was fun to make new friends. We decided that we must run a complete Alpha course with our newly trained leaders and that will start next weekend. And I will be involved. Our kids will have another opportunity to be involved too, no longer as servers but participants and I am excited about this opportunity for them to get to sit under our local leadership and learn. 

I am still waiting to hear back from the hotel about our internships and will go and check in with him this week. We have a visitor here who has come to help us create a video of our school to share the vision globally! Also, a member of the Alpha team is putting me in touch with a local investor who is very interested in our vocational program and is in need of workers and property managers. We may soon be getting a proper loo in our school and I won’t have to use the latrines any more! And as far as I know the gift shop is still planning to be built in the near future. 

I send my passport to the Embassy this week. Pray for favor there. All is well here. The weather remains stunning and I don’t feel too sorry for those in the heat wave in the States. I experienced severe heat from October until March with little to no air-conditioning and lots of discomforts in between. I am so happy to be here instead. But as always I just wish you were here!