Communications - Monday 15th May 2018

So early start today as men’s prayers were at 7am. Chris Paulson talked briefly about the story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts Chapter 8. In the story Philip is told by God to simply head south towards Gaza. Philip obeys and eventually meets up with the Ethiopian! The story eventually comes to an end when Philip baptises the Ethiopian in a nearby lake. But the point of the story that Chris made was that Philip did not know where he was going when God told him to go South, Philip simply obeyed and that going South caused him to meet up and baptise. The question to us all is how confident are we in what God is asking us to do? How many opportunities do we miss because we don’t think we have enough information to trust what we are hearing. Philip followed what God asked him to do, he didn’t know why he was walking South, but he heard and he followed. So what is God asking us to do and how are we going to summon up the courage to listen and follow? 

Monday is always a busy day for meetings and at 8am the whole Hands community meet together to reflect on the week ahead, to focus on things a particular topic and to pray for each other.

So today saw myself and Amy and her mum being welcomed. Amy and her mum had been in Malawi on a team for the past couple of weeks! They are from Calgary in Canada. To get to Hands they have to fly from Calgary to Toronto (4hrs), from Toronto to London (9hrs) and then the (11hrs) to Joberg - and we think that our flight is long.

Also there were several Hands volunteers going out to different distant communities for most of the week - so we prayed for them. Then we spent some time in small groups thinking about Care Workers from across Africa that we had come to know and what had stood out to us! I mentioned two ladies from SHARE, Promotion and Onie, who have been at Share each time that we have been there, I mentioned how I had found them both to be so dedicated to the Care Point and the children, Onie for her love of children and how she found time to go out and play with them, and Promotion who tirelessly looks after the Care Point and the cooking. Both of them are also so devoted to God, which comes out in the way that they sing and dance praises to Him.

The session concluded with us writing messages to the Care Workers on the back of photo’s and I was able to write messages from St Andrew’s to Mafambisa.

The rest of my day today was working with the communications team. And as well as being shown some stuff I was also able to contribute in the creation of an Auto-reply for our mail-chimp system.

Slight change in the weather, in that it rained heavily most of the day!