Raisin' Hale: South Africa Day 2

I have to be honest. The flight over here was hard for me. I've never flown 15+ hours and it didn't go well. I couldn't get comfortable, I couldn't sleep, we had 10 minutes of bad turbulence during the night and about half way through I almost freaked out b/c I realized I had just as many hours left to fly as I had just flown. I just wanted to be anywhere but on that airplane and then I read this is in "Jesus Calling", a devotional book I read.

"Be willing to go out on a limb with Me. If that is where I am leading you, it is the safest place to be. Your desire to live a risk-free life is a form of unbelief. Your longing to live close to Me is at odds with your attempts to minimize risk. You are approaching a crossroad in your journey. In order to follow Me wholeheartedly, you must relinquish your tendency to play it safe. Let Me lead you step by step through this day. If your primary focus is on Me, you can walk along perilous paths without being afraid. Eventually, you will learn to relax and enjoy the adventure of our journey together. As long as you stay close to Me, My sovereign Presence protects you wherever you go."

It was very sweet for the Lord to send this message to this Lady to write this devotional and for it to be dated on a day when I needed it at the exact moment. Thankful for His love. Thankful for His provision and grace.

Today was such a great day. I love my team. Great group of guys. Godly men and HILARIOUS. We had a free morning, so we went to Tala, a game reserve. It was really fun. We got to be very close to giraffes, rhinos, ostriches, and some other animals. Very cool.

We then went to a little town called Howick and had a really special lunch outside at a restaurant near a beautiful waterfall. There were miniature horses there, some special kind of donkeys, zebras. It was a fun time on a beautiful summer day. We then went back to Tabitha ministry to the orphanage. For those who don't know about Tabitha, it is a ministry that ministers to people in the Sweetwaters community and also has an orphanage that takes care of 33 precious children. I'll talk more about their community service later in the week. It's always fun to go to the orphanage. The kids have wonderful care givers, but not nearly enough for the kids to have one on one attention on a daily basis, so the kids LOVE to hug us, hold us, play with us. It is a really fun time. So, for two or three hours we just played. During this time it rained very hard and hailed. The kids LOVED it. We watched it, then they went out after it quit and collected all the ice. They had so much fun playing in the puddles. They call the men "Baba" which means Father and they call me "mama". It's always hard to leave. After the orphanage we grabbed some South African McDonald's and headed over to Stu and Sam's house for coffee and dessert. They are the leaders of Ithemba ministry. We spent time with them laughing, talking about living in South Africa, and prayed over the camp we will be leaving on tomorrow. We'll be taking 50 youths from the area of sweetwaters a couple hours away to the beach. We will be spending three days loving on them, teaching them truths about God, and having a lot of fun. I will have 6 zulu girls and a zulu leader to help. Pray that we can communicate. I don't speak zulu. They don't speak English all that well. Thankful God's love and message has no boundaries. He can open our ears to hear what we need to not matter our language. I'm very excited though. I'm not sure we'll have internet access, so I might not be able to update again until Wed. night. We'll see. I have so many pictures I want to share, but it takes about 10 minutes to upload one picture,so I'm just not able to upload many right now. Hopefully soon. Love going to bed completely exhausted. Love South Africa.