Learning to serve, serving to learn.

In Christ alone my hope is found

He is my light, my strength, my song

This Cornerstone, this solid ground

Firm through the fiercest drought and storm

What heights of love, what depths of peace

When fears are stilled, when strivings cease

My Comforter, my All in All

Here in the love of Christ I stand

All classes but two are either finished or on a break until we reach Cape Town in April, and this week will be the beginning of an entirely new chapter here. On Thursday, we will disperse to different places around the city that we have been assigned to, and for 4 weeks we will go to the same place, 4 days a week, and we will be servants for the organizations in the area that are in need of help. The place I will be serving at is called Walk In The Light, and it is a place that works to rebuild the communities around it and give tools to the residents in the townships so that they can receive an income that they earn themselves and can take steps closer to achieving a better quality of living. They assist people with HIV and AIDS who are too weak to work, and they do regular home visits as well as driving them to the clinics for appointments and medication. It is a place for children to come after school to play with friends and the staff while their parents are still working, and Walk In The Light puts on a youth group each week to spread a Christ-following faith to the youth in the communities. As my service site experience begins and progresses I will have many more details for you all, I’m sure :)

I am excited about finally getting to spend time with the people of this country and provide the little help that I can, I am honestly feeling slightly nervous. For the whole time we have been in this country so far, we have been in the classroom or on tours learning about the poverty, brokenness, and hardships of the people, and yet we sleep in our comfortable beds on a beautiful hillside campus that provides 3 meals a day and does my laundry for me (which has been quite expensive actually). This week, however, we will finally get to spend our days interacting and learning from the wonderful South African people and coming along side of them as they struggle to put food on their dinner table each night and have become used to their loved ones dying from HIV very regularly. I look forward to playing with the children and talking to the women, hearing their stories and learning from them.

Quite honestly, I have been nervous about this period of our semester. Because of my empathetic heart, I have been afraid to let myself fall completely in love with this country in fear of taking the pain of the people I meet onto myself, and carrying their burdens on my shoulders. I think I have subconsciously been guarding my heart up until this point, but I am beginning to find comfort through prayer and discovering once again that God has blessed me with empathy for others so that I can be a vessel in taking the burdens from others and giving them to God, and that because I am simply a vessel, these sorrows are not for me to carry but that God will free me of that heaviness and fill me with even more joy and love for me to in-turn pour back out. This is something that I know I could easily loose sight of, so if you all could be in persistent in prayer over this I would appreciate it so much.

Other prayer requests:

- -a large number of Christians in Nigeria, about 500, were killed on Sunday for simply being Christian.

- -The government in South Africa has passed a law to legalize prostitution in this country for the 2010 World Cup. Young children will be sold into prostitution in order to make money for their families, the damage this will cause to this country will take decades to repair, and HIV and AIDS will get a grip on many more lives all over the world.