I haven’t done as much travelling on this trip as I usually do, mainly because brother Harold has been suffering badly from sciatic pain after an injury last August. I’ve been able to help him have a few physio appointments since I arrived, but this has restricted our movements quite a bit. In any case, he finds it difficult to stand in the open air at the moment, and sitting in the car for prolonged periods doesn’t help him.
However the Lord makes no mistakes and this enforced limitation had provided a perfect opportunity to make some follow-up visits to contacts from earlier literature distribution.
This morning Harold and I had the great joy of speaking to a young lady called Nellie who listened very attentively as we explained the Gospel and shared our own testimonies with her. She first contacted Harold by sms after we visited Thondwe market with Seed Sower texts last August. Please remember her in your prayers. Nellie says she had trusted the Saviour, but has many unanswered questions. We left her with a selection of tracts and invited her to get in touch again.
Meanwhile, as we say in the car talking to Nellie, Mr Saidi was waiting to see us. We also met him at the market last August when he took a few tracts to distribute elsewhere. Today, as we talked with him it was clear that he loves the Lord and is active in open-air and door to door evangelism. We were able to apply him with several thousand tracts and a little booklet to help him in his understanding of the Gospel. We expect he will be looking for more tracts soon!
Later in Chinamwali we met two more contacts also involved in evangelism. One, James, was very clear on the Gospel, while the other was much less so. The “village gospel” which is little more than salvation by good works is so rampant here, and it is heart breaking how many we meet who are “sincerely lost”. Just like our final contact of the day, a leader of a village church looking for material to help him in his outreach work, who when giving us his testimony spoke at length about his call to serve God, his dreams and visions and the “amazing change” in his life since he started to serve, but never once mentioned the cross or faith in our Lord Jesus Christ! As I said, sincere. But lost.