The questions come out first when we see someone. Yes, we are ready to go ….. And we just finished packing.
We are always ready to go to Africa, whether we are packed or not! God prepared our hearts many years ago. If someone had called a week ago and said, “we need you to go early, can you leave tomorrow?” without a doubt, our answer is yes, we can go.
How do we prepare for a trip to Africa? We have spent the last 12 years preparing. First, God touched our hearts. Then, He began to teach us about the people of east Africa, what their particular needs are—their spiritual needs and their physical needs. He taught us even more about our own spiritual needs through them. He taught us about worshipping Him, about being gracious, about how much we need Him. Teaching a dramatically different culture is something that we can’t do with our own resources; we must depend on Him to lead, guide, and speak through us. We learn to eat food that we have never eaten before. We have learned that we can even get malaria and live through it.
God did a great work since our last letter—He provided all of the funds we needed! We have never had our funding completed this early. The study Bibles and the notebooks, which we shipped, have all arrived in Zambia! We are praying still that the team on the ground in Ndola will be able to work out all the details of the conference and that God will draw the pastor/couples to the conference.
In preparing for a mission trip, besides preparing notebooks, we have many other items we take besides our clothes. Some of the things we assemble to take with us for the conference:
- visual aids (vases, colored sand, marbles, wood balls, boxes, artificial roses, paper hearts, photo chemicals, iodine, clear plastic glasses, construction paper, alka selzer),
- gifts for participants (writing pens with flashlights, rubber bracelets with “perfect gift” embossed),
- gifts for longest/shortest marriages and translators (audio Bibles),
- gifts for hosts and African teams (Bible study aids, and other items).
We have a set curriculum and a similar procedure that we go through for each mission. However, each trip, each area, has it’s own uniqueness.
This trip is different in these ways:
- We are returning to the same city we ministered in 2006
- Ed will teach a one-day men’s seminar after our week of teaching (he will teach or preach 7 days in a row)
- we will stay at the same venue as the one where we will be teaching
- we are flying through Brussels (a new airport for us)
- and no one else is going with us.
The area has these characteristics:
- very high rate of HIV/AIDS
- much focus on the sexual relationship in marriage
- many men involved with pornography
- good English language skills
- and more educated people
We love and appreciate you and your support of the work God is doing through Living Well!
May the Lord bless you in your relationship to Him.
Donna and Ed Edwards
