Muli Bwanji

Hello from the Warm Heart of Africa!

Firstly we have finally got around to adding information in the About, Support and Contact Us pages, please have a look! Apparently the postal system isn’t too bad in Blantyre so please post away but nothing valuable! Also apologies for the mixed formatting in places, Blogger is tricky to use and doesn’t appear logical at times, we’ve tried to make it as clear as we can.

We’ve had a good three weeks since we last blogged. We’ve had the pleasure of seeing a number of different people from the UK who were visiting on trips; we travelled up to the capital city for a weekend to see some friends from Birmingham Vineyard, one of whom is a very close friend. Closer to home in Blantyre we’ve had a couple of evenings catching up with people who were part of the team during our first ever trip to Malawi, it was good to reminisce but also encouraging to recount the story of how God brought us to Malawi.

We’ve started our Chichewa lessons, the local language here in Malawi, we have found a great teacher who is patient along with being good fun! The lessons are challenging as the language is so different to English and we’re not natural linguists, we’ve also decided to up the lessons from one hour a week to two to speed up our learning.

We’ve continued spending time in His Presence together with no agenda aside from being in His Presence and it’s fun! He has been speaking a lot. The last time we did it one of the things Father did was highlight some fears we have but didn’t realise we did, one of them was in terms of fully trusting Him for financial provision. In England, due to our regular and secure salaries we were never in a position where we needed to really trust God for provision as we had enough and more. We’re now in a very different situation where the security of good salaries have gone and now we are totally dependent upon Him for all of our income and on paper, unlike before, the figures don’t stack up, that’s where the fear and faith step in. Once God had highlighted this fear I (Laura) went into fixer mode and thought well we just need to use the Sozo prayer tools and get rid of this fear quickly. It appears God doesn’t always share my ways of doing things! We believe it will be more of a process of learning to live without the crutch of salaries and through spending time in His Presence today Father has made it clear that it will be by abiding and experiencing His love that the fear will be cast out, a line of a song really stood out, ‘All my fears were drowned in perfect love’. So, we’re on the beginning of a journey of allowing His love to remove fears that perhaps we didn’t even know we previously had due to living in different circumstances. Also since February time Father has also been regularly revealing Himself to both of us as the Lion especially in relation to our time in Malawi so we’re going to do some reading around God as the Lion and see what else He might be saying. If anyone has already done any studying into this area already please feel free to share any thoughts!

That’s just a very quick nutshell of some of what Father has been saying and doing. In terms of prayer requests there’s two areas we’ve love you to pray into. One is our health, we’ve both had upset tummies since arrival, absolutely normal in our bodies transition from a very clean and sterile environment to the opposite really but we’d love it to end now! Mark has also been suffering with severe headaches behind his left eye for about a week now, (potentially cluster headaches). Secondly grace in terms of communal living, it has its perks but it also has challenges in terms of also complete lack of privacy, constant noise day and night and wisdom and hearing God when it is right to begin to seriously look for our more permanent home here in Blantyre. Very loud noise at 5-6am and late at night can drive one to look at the rental market!   

Thank you!

We’ve had some requests for photos, sorry for the lack of them, it’s easy to forget that what is becoming familiar to us isn’t to everyone!

This is our local café where we visit to have a bit of piece and quiet!

A fairly typical road in Malawi

      

The Road into Town

Last Sunday our church was invited to attend a service in a more rural location, to say thank you for help rebuilding their church building following the previous one being washed away in the floods last year. (Apologies but we are unable to flip the video the correct way round!)