“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”
“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”
It is almost time! I leave Nashville on the 9th to spend a little time with family in Georgia and South Carolina and speak to a few groups about the project in Cameroon. I fly back to Nashville on the 17th with SeaPort Airlines from Athens, GA, grateful for cheap, short one hour flights. I leave Nashville on the 20th and will fly to DC and spend one night with Laura and family and depart on the 21st on a very long, really expensive flight to Johannesburg. I stay over night on the 22nd and leave on the 23 for Douala, Cameroon. I got my visa in the mail yesterday! God's timing is perfect and it is time to go back and to see what Cameroon brings. The plan is to teach a course on cross cultural relations, based on the genius studies of David Maranz' African Friends and Money Matters and Georgia native Sarah Lanier's Foreign to Familiar. The project in Cameroon has massive potential to grow into a beautiful development model, working alongside the West to bring education, healthcare and food to an area where these are scarce. This course will lay a little foundation for this to grow.
Years ago I would want to know every detail so that I could see the future of the entire project and would have been fearful to step out into unknown territory and subjects way above my head. But now I have seen the miraculous happen by my just stepping out, completely into the dark and the unknown and in such deep water. I know He holds solutions and answers and has commissioned us to join Him. I see the vision for how development projects can work and bring tangible, sustainable solutions to poverty. I am going to Cameroon to lay groundwork. I am going to teach what I know and see what happens and drink tea with Sherri and dream with God and eat good food and shop the local markets and squeeze babies and attempt to sing amongst the Africans in their powerful, sweet harmony.
I will then go to South Africa for two weeks to view this project. And see their penguins and hike their mountains and eat their food. I will then go to Kenya to stay with Dr. Carola for a week or so in Nairobi. I want to check on her, be with her, spend a little time together, see her face. I will then go volunteer with friends in Mombasa on the coast of Kenya. They started a home for boys in 2007, taking boys off the street and giving them food, shelter and love. I can't believe I actually get to see this project in action. I watched the young girls who started it get in a tiny dusty dilapidated taxi cab with the trunk tied shut in Pemba, Mozambique and drive to Tanzania and later to Kenya to start this ministry. I am honored to be able to meet the boys of Rapha House and to learn from Carly. She is one of my heroes. She has stuck it out. She stayed. She has lasted and done well. I am massively impressed and I want to know her secret.
On the way home I will spend a few days in DC with Laura before returning home to Nashville. After that I have no clue. Sherri has told me that she throws seed out her back door in Cameroon and it takes root. I have had multiple confirmations that each destination is strategic. I am going to each place to throw out my seed. It's funny how just our presence in a place changes things. It has nothing to do with me or us but our willingness to act and to move. I often felt the reason I was in Mozambique was to play cards with the other missionaries and make them laugh. I know that I am going to Africa to open doors and windows and create opportunities not just for myself but for others. A missionary friend wrote me this week and told me she had no clue what she was doing. I felt her pain. But I also had to smile as I read her words as know how this position of cluelessness is where I most often see God show up. He swoops down and rescues us and shows us how and we know that it can only be Him, orchestrating it all and whispering His goodness and His secrets in our ears.
xo,
Grace
Grace, we eagerly await news of your journey. we learn much from you!
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