Day 5 - Sunday Blessings

I wanted to share with you what I did yesterday (Sunday). Most of the Rafiki Village staff and the rest from Crossroads went into Lusaka for church services. Lusaka is about an hour away from the Rafiki Village.

Instead of going with them, I decided to stay here and attend a local village church which is located just off the Rakifi property. (A photo of us in front of this church is on the blog under Day 4. We'd visited it on Saturday during a walk off the property.) This particular church has no windows or doors, and you sit on concrete benches without backs. The men sit on the right side as you enter the church and the women sit on the left.

Vicky Koch, one of the Rafiki staff members, went with me. She had warned me that it was very likely that the local town people would ask me to deliver the message; and sure enough, they did ask me to deliver the message to the congregation. All 27 Rafiki children and their Mamas (women who function as their Mama once they come to Rafiki orphanage) were there plus about 30 people from the nearby village.

Luckily for me, we had begun a study of Romans, Chapter 8, at Crossroads Church before leaving Lexington; and the 4 others from CCC and I have been discussing it this past week at the guest house in the evenings.

My message came from that study (thanks Griff!) and focused on reading from the Bible to the congregation plus sharing my own thoughts and some of the discussions we'd had this week about the book of Romans. Mama Mwanza from the Rafiki Vaillage translated my talk for the congregation. Although English is the official language of Zambia, there are many native languages here, too. The people from the nearby village speak Nyanja and some English.

We sang songs from their Baptist hymnal in the language of Nyanja. The good thing is that the language is very phonetic so that, if I could understand what song number to look up, I could actually sing along with everyone at church. I didn't recognize the songs until the offering when I knew we were singing "Brining in the Sheaves." The harmonies of the voices were amazing as everyone sang.

The 27 children from Rafiki also sang a couple of songs that they had learned at school including "Great is Thy Faithfulness." Although the service was just under 2 hours, the time just flew by. What a blessing it was to worship God here in Zambia!