Hello
Friends & Family,
In this blog
I (Mike) wanted to share with you the story of one of our recent students. I will call her Faith (not her real name) as
she has been growing so much in her journey of faith with the Lord!
Faith comes
from a very broken family background, like most of our students, with an absent father, neglectful mother
and trying to survive living in poverty.
For years now she would say that she has been desperate for hope.
As she came
to Hope Africa to go through our job training program she met Jesus in a
radical way through FDG (Faith Discovery Group, one of the programs I oversee
in our church related ministries). She
shared how she was in the midst of a serious crisis, both personally and in her
marriage. She was feeling very discouraged,
lacking identity and looking for peace.
In her marriage her husband was repeatedly cheating on her, saying he was
sorry, but then falling back again into another affair.
In FDG she
discovered that Jesus is the one who brings real life, life to the full. At first this was hard for Faith to accept as
she had gone to church for a long time and nothing good ever seemed to happen.
Faith then
started to meet regularly with Bishop Nyanga (one of our pastoral staff) and he
helped her to understand that going to church is not the same as choosing to
follow Jesus with her life and growing in a relationship with Jesus. He presented the gospel to her and explained
how even people who go to church can still have a hole inside if they are not
walking with Jesus.
Faith’s
heart was ready to make a change and she accepted Christ as her Lord &
Savior! Mawande (our FDG teacher & my brother in-law) encouraged her to
surrender trying to "change" her husband but to instead trust in God
that He can change her husband.
Over the
next few days the joy in Faith’s life was so contagious that the other students
started asking her: "What has happened to you?". Faith was growing rapidly in her new life in Christ, learning to trust
in God and growing in her knowledge of Scripture & prayer. As she was learning these things, each and
every day she would go home and tell her husband what she was learning.
These
conversations start to grab her husband’s interest. One of the days she got home and asked her
husband a question from class that day: “What is church?”. He said something about singing and
preaching. Faith then took her notes
from class and helped her husband to see from the Scriptures what the church is
really meant to be. The husband got to the
point that he realized that he had also been missing out on following Jesus,
but he continued to resist making changes in his life.
Over the
next few weeks Bishop Nyanga kept encouraging Faith to invite her husband to
church, even if he doesn’t want to go.
Then the husband came to Hope Africa to learn about our new Trade Skills
(carpentry, metal work, plumbing, and electrical) program. That afternoon, Faith and her husband met
with Bishop Nyanga and he led the husband to Jesus, and they begin some
marriage counselling!
Over the
next few weeks Faith was easily the person with the most joy walking around the
Hope Africa campus and her life and her husbands lives have been radically
changed! Together they came and
celebrated Faith’s graduation from Hope Africa and now they are continuing to
attend Bishop Nyanga’s church.
