This morning is a bit surreal. To be honest, I'm pretty tired...ready to be home with Lisa. That life is just so much more comfortable. I'm running on fumes emotionally, a little bit physically and probably spiritually as well. As you can tell from the post title, I've lost track of days. I guess technically it is Monday morning here in Chipata. All of my American friends and family are sleeping, it is 1:17 a.m. in Iowa. It is 8:17 a.m. here on the new S2S farm. So it has been roughly 11 days since I left Huxley at 3:30 a.m. on a Thursday that seems like ages ago.
So what has God actually done?
I'm sitting on the ramp for the goats to use to walk into their new enclosure. We actually have 3 goats on the way, I guess I'll have to vacate when they get here. I'm in the middle of the new S2S farm located on 3.5 acres adjacent to Jonathon Banda's church. I love Jonathon, he is a great brother...and will make a fantastic partner in this Kingdom venture. The 3.5 acres is surrounded by a new security fence (6' woven wire, with steel posts) and the gate is awesome. It cost us roughly $250 to have that welded by a local guy from scratch. As I look at that gate, I think it would cost $3-5k in the States.
To my left there is a group of guys from Jonathon's church that are digging/building the latrine. It is bascally a hole in the ground that will have some sort of barrier/housing in front of it. Just about 150' to the right of the latrine is the new caretakers house. It is built of bricks that were fired from the ground by the same men who are doing all of the construction labor. It has a wood framed roof structure and aluminum sheets for the actual roof. The roof was just put on yesterday, and today's project is completing the brick work to fill in the gaps between the house and roof.
To my right is the new poultry building. It is concrete block foundation with brick structure. It is mostly open air with chicken wire walls. One end has a brick secure storage area for feed and tools. On the other end are 28 nesting boxes where the hens will prefer to lay their eggs. We currently have 100 "layers" in the main area that seem to have made themselves at home. Dr. Youngs says the building is large enough to house 400 hens, but before we get there the team is going to need to figure out the economics of the project.
All of this was completed in 10 days. The funding - roughly $22,000 - was provided by six American S2S donors. The land is owned by Repentence Baptist Church. The labor was mostly completed by 25 Repentence Baptist men...who were supervised by William Banda, a friend to S2S from Lusaka; and Jose Rivera, a friend to S2S from Iowa. We have 6 S2S Zambian staff that have worked diligently for weeks now to make this happen, and they are very ready to get home to their families as well.
Yesterday we completed our 4th and final Feast Day. We were roughly 1 hour from our hotel in the Kasenengwa region, and about 25 of our S2S pastors were in attendance. We started the day with 2 hours of pastoral training.
The first 60 minute session we call Remedial S2S, and was designed to keep all of us on the same page in terms of S2S vision and mission. We spent time tracking the Apostle Paul's development and execution of his Collection for the Saints, which basically connected surplus from all of the churches that he planted and visited, to other churches that were experiencing material deficit - primarily in the area of food insecurity. In a simple sentence, S2S believes God wants His people to eat. And as Hannah prophetically said in her prayer cry to God in 1 Samuel, God dictates who will be born poor and which of his people will be born into opportunity and wealth. And Paul taught, and more importantly exemplified, how to connect those disparate parts of God's Kingdom. That's the heart of what S2S is about.
The second session was a 2026 message to be delivered specifically on this trip. In February I started asking God if there was anything He wanted me to teach, and some truths jumped out of Scripture over those next few months. There were really 2 messages that I was entrusted with, the first was for the pastors. Primarily we are ratcheting down the scope of who we are trying to help. We are asking the churches to focus exclusively on the "destitute" and that is really encouraging to me. There is no way that S2S could make much of a dent in poverty or even hunger in Zambia. Even the level of food insecurity just in the Zambian church would overwhelm a small organization like us. But if God's goal is simply to make sure there are no destitute in the churches that He assigns to us...well that actually seems achievable. I challenged each of the churches we met with to be the first to reach out to brother Rob and say, "Hey Rob, we've got our own destitute under control...why don't you move us from the recipient side of the S2S balance sheet to the donor side." Let's see what God does with that, lol.
That session ends with a really sweet riddle of sorts that is tucked into 5 or 6 stories that span 1,500 years or so. If you can meditate on Jesus' annointing in Matt 26, God's promise to multiply the seed of the generous out of 2 Cor 9, God's depiction of righteous men from Psalm 111/112, a key component of His Mosaic Law from Lev 25 and Deut 15, and the famous sheep and goats discourse from Matthew 25 you might see the beautiful reality of Jesus' presence on this earth today. And ironically, I'm sitting on a goat enclosure watching Jesus work. God's Word is super fun to me!
After the pastors' training, we enjoyed a beautiful worship service together. Imagine singing along to the hymn Count Your Blessings in English, as a few hundred of the poorest Chritians on the planet sing in a language you can't understand...but to a music score that is recognizable from your childhood. That was pretty special. I then stood at the pulpit and delivered another challenging message to these beautiful, poor people. The message suggested that this life is a test. God tests us...but more importantly, we are called to test ourselves as we follow Him. Wrapping that up at the communion table, where we were all called to examine ourselves...well, I feel really fortunate to be assigned this task.
Ok, this might be my final blog. Maybe I will try to do a wrap up when I get on the plane, or maybe from home. If I'm really lucky, maybe I can do it from my cabin in Southern Iowa over the coming weekend...please pray that God gets me there. That feels like the promised land to me right now! But before that, we are gonna grab pizza again at the end of this final work day. We will have a short safari tomorrow/Tuesday before we prepare to depart. Wednesday will see us up early to cross the border into Malawi for an afternoon departure on Ethiopian Airlines. We will have a medium flight to Addis Ababa...a long flight to Chicago - that includes sitting on the runway for an hour in Rome in the middle of that night (whatever night that is, the time zones get all jumbled on the way back)...if God is gracious we will have a quick trip through immigration in Chicago, and if we are really lucky we will have time for an American breakfast...and then one final short flight to Des Moines.
If you are praying for our team (Dr. Youngs actually departed this morning and is already on that journey!), please pray now over the next 3 days for travel mercies, no health flare ups, and some reasonable sleep patterns. I've appreciated you taking this journey with me. The prayers of God's people are really effective, at least that is what we are told.
So one last time, here we go...
