We recently had a mission team from Michigan here with us that was the last mission team of the year. As I’ve mentioned before it was a great year for our missions department. We hosted more teams and brought over more people than any other year and when we have more mission teams that means more people in the villages of Qwa-Qwa, Intabazwe, and Kalinioni to share the gospel. There were so many stories from teams this year about God doing amazing things, but this was my favorite…

On our second day in Qwa Qwa, my group saw a woman sitting on her front step, eyes covered with her hands. We introduced ourselves and found out her name was Maria. Her eyes were horribly bloodshot and had a slight cloudiness over the pupils. She said she had been in pain for over two years. And then she pointed to her feet and told us she couldn’t wear shoes because her feet had been painfully swollen for a long time. We asked if we could pray and she said, “If you pray for me, I will be healed.”

We were all instantly encouraged by her incredible faith, and we prayed for her. When we finished praying, she told us the pain was gone! We were so excited and told her that we would keep praying, because by the end of the week, she was going to see us coming, clearly.

Sure enough, we went back the next day, and her eyes were no longer cloudy, and there was still no pain. And then the next day, God had healed the pressure, and the blood vessels had relaxed and her eyes were no longer bloodshot. She thanked us repeatedly and told us she thanked God for bringing us to Africa. We left with our spirits high and our hearts encouraged by God’s healing grace. He is not just alive and moving, He is alive and moving in the small corners of the world, like Maria’s house in Qwa Qwa. We thank God that Maria can see perfectly and pain-free again.

Oh, and she can wear shoes again, too.

I’ll be home for Christmas this year! I’m coming back in December and then staying a couple extra months for some chill time as well as trying to built up my support base. I don’t think I’ve been back for Christmas in about 2 years, so I’m really excited about that. I’m going to be in Jacksonville and Orlando until the end of February, so there is going to be plenty of time to catch up with everybody. I know there is a lot of people I haven’t connected with for some time, so I’m really looking forward to that.

I haven’t been to a Christian concert since college, so it was great when Kelly and I got to take the interns to Passion back in August. I say concert, but that’s not really what it is. It’s more of a conference. It’s an entire day long that has a few seessions of teaching, but also lots of worship.

One of the things that I never really get to do out here in Africa is enjoy corporate worship. There’s nothing like enjoying worship in a group of 5,000 people, all with a passion for God. And who better to lead worship than Chris Tomlin! It was the first time I’ve heard him live and he didn’t dissapoint. Another band that was there was FEE. I’ve never heard of them before, but they turned out to be great! I’m pretty sure they’re going to have a huge following in the coming years.

Along with the worship Lioue Giglio did a few sessions of teaching. I teach a class to the interns where we use a lot of his videos so I’ve seen his teachings a lot, but it was great to see him live. He just has a way of teaching the word of God, that makes me wonder if he’s teaching out of the same bible I have. It was powerful.

It’s been a busy last couple months here at Thrive, sorry I didn’t send out an email last month. We’ve had a lot mission teams out here from the States, which means I spent most of my days driving teams into villages instead of spending time in the office. It’s both good and bad. It’s great to go out with teams and get to know them and hear all the stories they have at the end of the day. The down side is that I don’t get too much time in the office so not too many projects are getting done these months. I’ve done the Joburg 6 hour round-trip drive more times than I can remember. I’m not really sure which I’d prefer… I like to be in the office and get work done, but I’m realizing that it’s a great refresher of why I’m out here in the first place to be out in the villages and be with the people of Africa.

Back on March when we were accepted in the Google Grants program I wasn’t really sure what kind of increase we would see in the traffic to our website. Well, just 4 months later and it’s safe to say that the program is exceeding my expectations. Not only has traffic to the website increased tremendously, but the interests in our internships, team hosting, and staff positions is off the charts. Just to give a quick example, over half of our 16 Summer Interns found us on Google!

I log in to Facebook about once every couple months and hardly ever confirm friends, but it seems to know me so well.

With gas prices at $5.85 a gallon over here it cost me a whopping $93.00 to fill up my truck the other day.

Road trip anyone?

There’s been a whole lot going on here at Thrive over the last month. We had a mission team from Virginia here with us, our village discipleship classes had graduation, over 280 students attended our Leadership Day event, and what would a small town be without the circus coming to town.

For the most part I wasn’t involved too much with those events because I’ve been immersed in designed the next curriculum for our AIDS prevention program, Leadership Summit.
This one focuses on, well, AIDS. We’ve written ones before that talk about AIDS in certain ways, but this one focuses entirely on the subject.

When we asked kids what they would like to learn more about, an overwhelming topic was that of AIDS. You would think that in a country where 1 in 4 people are HIV positive, kids would already know so much about the subject. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Kids don’t really know much at all on the subject. It’s not talked about and it’s definitely not taught in the schools.

The still “untitled” curriculum has a total of 10 chapters and each chapter is split into 3 sections: Truth, God, You. The truth section is all about giving these kids the facts about AIDS. I know it sounds simple, but we still encounter kids here in South Africa that don’t even believe AIDS is real. I know, crazy! The next section focuses on what God says. How He created them to live out their life using their gifts and talents and that He doesn’t want anything to get in the way of that! The “You” section is the application part. In a sense, “we’ve given you all the facts and tools now it’s up to you”.

So far I’ve got about 6 chapters completed and it’s starting to come together rather nicely. I’m always a bit nervous when I start on these projects because it seems crazy that I have about 6 weeks to come up with what is basically a magazine all by myself. Luckily, I’m not alone on this. Marc, an intern here, has been a lot of help with the design.

So what’s next for me when I finished this curriculum…. another curriculum!

In the beginning of the month we packed up our 10 interns and headed out on a 2 day drive to the Love Botswana Outreach Mission in Botswana. This is an annual mission trip we go on to serve the ministry in whatever way we can, most of the time doing things most mission teams probably don’t want to do. This year we spent the majority of our time renovating a 5-bedroom, 2-bathroom house they have on their property It was a huge project that had us sanding down about 1,000 sq. feet of wood floors. We also re-vanished the floors, gave the place a fresh coat of paint, and totally renovated an entire bathroom, thanks to our intern, Matt Moline

It was a lot of of hard work, but very rewording in the end. I’m kind of jealous of who ever gets to move into that house. See photos of the renovation.

Internship Video… We recently made a new video that has our interns sharing a bit about what they’ve been up to these first few months. If you’ve ever wondered what our interns do around here. This would be a great way to find out.

Mass Mailer… Earlier this month I got to create a mass mailer piece that went out to 2,500 churches in the US. The goal of this promo piece is to help gain interest in churches bring out a mission team to us. This is the first mailer we’ve done at Thrive, so it will be interesting to see what kind of response we get out of it.