The Lord is Peace Church

Sunday was filled with experiences I will not soon forget. (I began this post Sunday night, but it has taken 3 days to finish writing this post since things have been a little crazy. Forgive the time jumping in my language).

Ok, so picture the typical sub-Saharan movie scene and that was our morning. Our mini-bus taxi arrived at 9:15 for a 9 o’clock service that was 30 minutes away. And, as we expected might happen, Steve was giving the Bible study. We drove out of the “city” part of Lusaka towards the compounds where the poverty is even greater. Just the word “compounds” tells you that these are not nice places to live. We went to The Lord is Peace International Church, which meets in the elementary school at Chowama compound. Now, I have been to many church plants that meet in schools, but never one quite like this. When we pulled up to the gate, of course everyone stared at us because we were the only “muzungus” (white people) in sight. There are plenty of nationalities in Lusaka proper, but apparently, only there! There was trash blowing all over. The kids were all chewing on what looked like bamboo, but was raw sugarcane. I’m not sure I could have ever imagined what we observed next, but this was not the only church meeting at this elementary school. In fact, there were at least 10, probably more, churches meeting there at the same time. It was incredible! Almost every classroom building had a different church meeting in it, so as you walked through, you could hear hundreds of people praising God in tons of different ways…it was pretty cool. They took the kids outside right away to play with the dozens of other kids already running around. Amazingly though, when I looked out a few minutes later, they were all sitting quietly in a circle listening to a lesson on Noah’s Ark in 2 languages. Meanwhile, inside, Steve was teaching with a translator, we think for the first time ever. There is something incredibly powerful about hearing the Gospel preached in a language you don’t understand.
“Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?” James 2:5. I was so encouraged by our friends and the hospitality extended to us. They have nothing. But they spread bedsheets out on the first row of benches so we could have special seating. Most of them were uneducated and spoke only a few words of English, but they went out of their way to sing the English words of their traditional songs. I was touched.

Overlooking Road by Manda Hill Mall

After lunch, we walked to Manda Hill. Picture a typical American Mall, but with a Walmart-type store and a grocery store as the anchor stores. It’s only a 15 minute walk from our apartment, so we go there every couple of days…thanks, Lord, for this convenience! There isn’t really anything that we’ve wanted and haven’t been able to find there and we’ve been able to make some pretty good meals (even though they’ve been American meals with Zambian ingredients up to this point).
And, as a completely random thing…we happened to see Turkish Delight (like from the Chronicles of Narnia), so we had to buy some and try it…kind of like a chocolate covered gumdrop…just in case you ever wondered!

Our Apartment at the Baptist Mission of Zambia

We are staying in an apartment at the Baptist Mission of Zambia, a compound here in Lusaka, mainly designed to house missionaries. On Sunday nights they have an International Bible Study where we met lots of very well-connected Christians. We got connections to several other adoptive families, the embassy, doctors, taxi drivers, and people with a wealth of knowledge from living here a long time. We serve a God who is not only in the big picture, but has every little intricate detail of our lives choreographed…it’s neat to watch how that plays out.

I’m laying here not able to sleep. My stomach is growling. I had a great dinner with new friends…there were even a few leftovers. All this while my baby lays in an orphanage a few miles away where her stomach is probably beyond growling since she hasn’t had a meal of nshima since about 2pm and won’t have another one until tomorrow morning. Please, Lord, help us find our baby soon!

Please pray for us. So far, in our 5 days here, we really haven’t gotten much in the way of good news. In fact, most of the news we have received so far has been pretty discouraging. We spoke with someone tonight who suggested it could take up to a month to even begin fostering a child, meaning this process would take even longer than we could have imagined. Pray for God’s power to be made evident, for his peace to comfort us and for us to see God’s work in our lives throughout this process. Please pray for a miracle. We have a big meeting tomorrow at 11:00am. We’ll update everyone as soon as we can. For the glory of God in our lives and in the nations.

We so appreciate all of your prayers and we wanted to make sure that we tell you as much as we can share about what is happening here.  Basically, when we arrived at HOM (House of Moses) yesterday, we were told by the social worker there that in order for any of the children to be officially approved for adoption, some further research must be done.  Now, while that was sad to hear as we are eager to move through this process, we are not discouraged and we will continue to pursue our child.  We will continue to go to the orphanage each day and play with the children there (they are soooooo adorable!).  The social worker from the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) and the social worker from HOM had a meeting today (a miracle in and of itself – we were initially told that meeting wouldn’t happen till Tuesday!) to discuss case files and we now have a meeting scheduled with the DSW social worker on Tuesday (Monday is Labour Day here).  Please pray that the social workers have wisdom and that they will conclude that the best way to care for one of these children would be for us to be their forever family.

In a previous post, I recounted the events of the tornado striking the St. Louis airport as we were sitting on our plate at the gate waiting for clearance to depart. Certainly, this was not how we envisioned our adoption adventure beginning. But since that event, I have not stopped reflecting on it.

That tornado struck, if you will remember, on Good Friday. The irony is not lost on me. Good Friday is the day of the church calendar that we set aside each year to reflect the extent to which God went to redeem us – the death on a cross of the Second Person of the Trinity. In some small way, the destruction we saw and experienced out of that day’s tornado, and my reflection on my willingness to endure anything and pay any cost (including experience a tornado take out the airport I was at), reminded me of Christ’s redeeming love. I “suffered” a tornado that destroyed the entire area around the airport (praise God, no casualties!). Christ, willing to endure anything and pay any cost, allowed himself to be crucified on that first Good Friday. Why? In order that God the Father might adopt us – me and you – as his sons.

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of God the Father” (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus endured more than is possibly imaginable to make me his son. By the strength of his Spirit, I will now endure whatever I must in order to bring my child home.

PS> I know this post is a little late – the tornado was 1 week ago, but it was also 6 time zones, 4 flights, 3 continents and 8000+ miles ago, so cut me some slack!

Photo courtesy of AP

This morning started with excitement… anticipation… nervous energy. We started actively moving on an adoption in November 2009. It took us 8 months to select a country. We put the process on hold as I accepted a call at a new church and we moved to Florida, but then we started right back into the process. We spent hours filling out paperwork. We decided to keep going even after the adoption agency we were with closed their Zambia program (remember it took us 8 months to decide on Zambia – we weren’t changing!). But we kept going through all of that because we were convinced that we had a child waiting for us to come rescue him or her.

All of that led us to today – the day we left our house. The day our journey began. The day that started with excitement, anticipation and nervous energy as we were finally traveling to find our child! We fly out of Philly on Tuesday, but, in trying to save some money, we used reward tickets to fly up from Florida. Unfortunately, because it is a holiday weekend, the only reward tickets we could get took us through St. Louis.

Well, as today turned out, our two hour layover in St Louis is now a 2 day stopover in St Louis. We boarded our flight and the flight attendants told us they were trying to board us quickly because a bad storm cell was on the way. In fact, at least once, they thought we were clear to push back from the gate and head out. Each time it looked like we were about to get clearance, the lightning picked up again.

Then, the shaking. I’ve never been shaken. I’ve never experienced anything like this and I’m sure glad that we were on the ground as the plane was shaking all over. They called an emergency evacuation of the plane and we went running off the plane and up a dark path as the power was out. A tornado had hit the airport! All the windows in the main terminal were blown out. Once everyone was off, I ran back down and onto the plane to get our carry-on that contained all of our adoption paperwork. We did not want to lose that! (more…)