Dumelang!
I hope this finds you well. Lots of exciting ministry is coming up! This week we restart up the Scripture Union club at one of the Jr Secondary Schools in Mochudi, we start leading the morning assemblies at that school and the Sr. Secondary School, and I will hopefully speak this Friday to the Christians at the Sr. Secondary School (it had to be postponed again because the teacher who would’ve unlocked/locked the hall for me had to attend a funeral).
On Wednesday this week, the recently revived YFC dance & drama team was invited to perform dances to two songs before a speaker at a school-wide assembly. I went along to watch and was amazed that the speaker ended up being from a local church and essentially just preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole student body and encouraged their turning from the things of the world (i.e. drugs, drinking, fornication, vandalism, theft) to find true life in Christ. Many students stood up in response to his asking who wants Jesus to save them and wants to put their faith in Christ and follow Him. They went up to the front where they prayed. I am not the best at estimating numbers, but it probably around 100 students who stood! I will invite those students, as well as those who committed to Christ last year through the Face the Nation program, to come to the talk I’ll give hopefully this Friday on how to grow in one’s faith.
The abstinence club (Real Life Revolution) was slated to start yesterday, and I was able to make an announcement to the whole school on Friday morning about it. However, yesterday the guards at the gate wouldn’t allow me in; they had been given strict orders to not allow anyone in. Even when I called the guidance/counseling teacher who had gotten permission for the club and had her talk to the guards, they did not let me in. The guidance teacher said it was the first she had heard of some type of policy the guards were mentioning, so she said she would talk with the guards and the administration about it on Monday. So…please pray with us that we are able to start this club. It is the first club YFC will have ever started at the school. So hopefully it will start next Saturday at 2:30pm.
Last week I stopped by and talked with the guidance teacher at a Sr. secondary school in Gaborone where I co-led the PACT (peer-counseling club) last year. They haven’t had clubs last term or this current term, but they said we can revive the PACT club next term (starting April 5). Also, they invited us to teach 2 classes for 90 minutes on Life Skills (i.e. self-esteem, withstanding peer pressure, encouraging abstinence, etc) this Wednesday! So 4 of us from YFC are going to do that; 2 to teach each class. They are also interested in having the visiting YFC South African Dance & Drama team present to the whole school in March.
March is the “Month of Youth Against AIDS” in Botswana and we have been given the opportunity to lead the Sunday morning Christian program on a national, secular radio station every Sunday in March (starting this coming Sunday!). We still have a lot to do to prepare for that, so please if you think of it, we would love prayers for wisdom and guidance. Somehow it seems to be that I am in the lead of this, so yeah, prayers appreciated! We know our basic topics and the basic plan – to interview random people on the street this week and have them respond to questions, recording them with a portable recording device. Then play those sound bytes on the air on Sunday and open up the lines to live responses and discussion. This week will be about abstinence and how to live so I don’t get HIV/AIDS.
Saturday I will lead the first volunteer training in Gaborone for all the college-age volunteers I’ve had the opportunity to recruit to be mentors and/or YFC volunteers in general. There are 36 students from 4 different colleges/institutes signed up to volunteer! The YFC Botswana national director, E.J., will also share during that training. It is good to make sure volunteers understand and agree with what YFC stands for and what is expected of them as volunteers.
Memories of My Dad
Well, this past Wednesday, February 23 was my dad’s birthday. He would have been 62 years old. I had been working for months of a memory tribute about him and wanted to have it done by his birthday. I indeed completed it and wanted to share some excerpts from it. It is quite long, so I didn’t want to post it all on here, but if you would like me to email you the whole thing, please just email me at em_jc_liddy@yahoo.com (with underscores between em, jc, and liddy) and I will send a copy your way. Here are some excerpts to give you a flavor for what it’s like (I included mainly humorous parts but there are more meaningful parts too):
[When we lived in Dexter Michigan until I was 9 years old]: So dad would faithfully walk Pippin and our new puppy Ruffles each day with us to school and for other walks around town. Dad would also walk with Ryan and me down Second Street to the Dexter Mill where we would each pick out a stick candy treat. Sometimes he would walk us to Wylie Wonderworld (a large playground that we loved!) or to the ballfields at the school so we could play baseball. We always liked when we walked past Mugg n’ Bopps gas station because they scooped up the most massive ice cream cones I’d seen in my young life…and dad would often treat us. This reminds me of how one day I went to Hell and back…dad took me to Hell, Michigan, and I got an ice cream cone there. It melted quickly…
Up through middle school, dad would make and pack lunches for Ryan and me. But he wouldn’t just pack it with food. He also packed it with literary entertainment. He would write a story for each of us on our lunch bags, filling up both the front and back, to read with our friends at lunch every day. It was like a soap opera, in that the story continued day after day. He had a different story line going for each of us, and each morning he would take that considerable time to continue both stories. I can still remember the last day of 8th grade, when we all gathered around in the cafeteria to hear the end of the saga.
[Then I talk about how dad loved being a school bus driver and was affectionately known as “Mr. Bus Driver Sir” throughout the district]
In fact, dad’s love for driving bus spilled over into his “off-work” time. When we would ride with dad, perhaps just to embarrass and humor us, he sometimes would put his 4-way flashers on our family Dodge Caravan (mini-van) when approaching a railroad crossing, come to a complete stop, turn off the radio, and open his door or roll down the window to listen for trains before proceeding across the tracks! Later when it came time to buy a full-size Ford utility van, he discovered with utmost glee that it was the first year that school bus yellow would be offered as an option! He pleaded with his good lady wife to be able to get it in yellow, and though she was not particularly keen on the idea, Mom eventually gave in. Thus, he drove for several years what came to be known as “The Bus.” It came with grey bumpers, but to make it resemble a school bus even more, he painted the bumpers black…and his bus driver friends put number decals of his school bus number on the back window! One time I was driving home and saw a school bus about a half mile ahead of me driving north, and I wondered what sports game our school had up north that day…then I saw it turn into my driveway! It was “The Bus,” not a school bus!
Back when we were still in high school, dad would utilize ingenious methods to get Ryan and me to wake up and get out of bed on the weekends or in the summer. Our ranch-style house in the woods came with a sound system throughout the house with speakers in each room connected to the main stereo in the living room. Each room had volume control knobs so you could choose to listen to the music or not. Dad would sneakily reach into our rooms and turn our volume knobs all the way up. Then he would turn on the first song of the Lion King soundtrack, “Circle of Life,” on full blast. It begins with a sudden loud, “NAAAAAAtsabenYAAAAAA!!!!!…..” by an African man, and if you know the song, you can imagine how hearing that out of nowhere definitely would cause wakefulness, if not accompanying temporary incontinence! Speaking of incontinence, another method my dear father employed to rouse me from my slumber was to enter my room with two glasses, one filled with water. He would pour the water back and forth between the glasses until I had to get up and run to the bathroom to avoid suffering temporary incontinence! He took great delight in these tactics and their success.
Here is an entertaining start to an email from 2002:
Sweetie
or if you've just come in from a run,
Sweatie…
In the summer of 2005, I worked as a camp counselor at a Christian camp in Virginia. Dad sent me perhaps the cheesiest postcard on the face of the earth, with a picture of a bunny on the front and the words, “Some bunny in Michigan loves [or misses] you.” Only he didn’t just send it once. Nor twice. Nor thrice. Rather, he sent perhaps 15-20 of these bunny postcards! The reason being that on the backs of the postcards, he wrote a soap-opera-like story just like he used to do years before on my lunch bags! At some point during the summer, he must have bought out the whole stock of bunny postcards, or perhaps he desired to be even more random and literally cheesy—for it struck his fancy to cut up Cheez-It cracker boxes and make at least another 10-15 postcards from those to finish the epic tale!
A random email a month before dad died:
Subject: Tuesday tidings
Em......
I love you.
dad:-)
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Just a couple hours after finishing the memory tribute on dad’s birthday, February 23, I was back at home and found the emotion finally welling up into tears. I stole away into the darkness outside under the stars to cry and express the cry of my heart to God—“I miss my dad. I just miss my dad.” I came back inside but was still on the verge of tears, missing my dad. My eyes glanced at my bookshelf, and as I looked at a particular book, a page number popped in my mind. So I got up and opened to that page. It was a fiction book I haven’t yet read, but on that page the main character was experiencing heaven—no pain, the best he had ever felt, joy welling up inside him. However, he hadn’t died yet—God was allowing him to see a glimpse of heaven while he was still alive on earth. He saw an army of God’s children from every tribe and tongue, and even though the main character didn’t know what was going on, they did and the anticipation was almost too much for them. I kept reading to see what they were anticipating...
Next, he saw adults, and one in particular in the distance was having difficulty keeping in what he was feeling…he could not contain himself. He asked the Holy Spirit why that one was having so much difficulty, and the Holy Spirit answered, “The one having so much trouble containing himself—that one—is your father.”
Then main character found himself running toward his father, like a little boy wanting his daddy. He was running, not caring for anything but the object of his heart, and he found him. His father was on his knees in tears. “Daddy!...Daddy, I love you!” They embraced, unable to speak through the tears.
Then after that glimpse into heaven was over, the Holy Spirit embraced him and held him as he continued to cry.
I wrote this in my journal right afterward on February 23:
Lord, could this have been any more perfectly fitting?! Just the other day I wrote above that “It was almost as if he [dad] couldn’t contain his love for us” and a few hours ago I typed up how I pictured dad in heaven just overwhelmed by God’s glory and love, on his knees just absolutely overcome and weeping in joyful awe. And now tonight as I was deeply missing my dad on his birthday, Your Sweet Spirit, the Comforter, led me to the passage that could not possibly have fit more perfectly—a person on earth getting a glimpse of heaven and reuniting at long last with his daddy—who was on his knees weeping in overcome awe before they embraced and kissed. “Unable to speak through the tears”—that describes me as I read the passage—my eyes blurring from tears as I pictured dad in heaven and the day I will run into his arms again. It was as if, like the main character, I got a glimpse of heaven and what is to come. I’ve known in my head that I’ll see dad again in heaven, but this was like my heart experiencing that truth after I’d just been crying out to God under the stars that I miss my dad. I will see him again. I will hug him again. And yes, he will be happy to know I will kiss him again :). And I felt the Lord whisper to my heart that the day of this glorious reunion is not too far off in light of eternity. “It’ll come soon enough”—He will sustain and carry me until that day.
And as the main character felt embraced by the Spirit as he continued to cry after experiencing that reunion, so I just melted in tears, overwhelmed by the “God of all comfort” who is so perfectly, tenderly sufficient to carry me through the darkest, deepest valleys. I was crying tears of amazed joyful awe of a God who cares for me so intimately and praising him for how good He is, how beautifully good He is.
As dad said in his final moments on earth, our time on earth is SO SHORT compared to eternity. Soon enough we will be together again in the Lord’s presence. Amen.
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Thanks for your continued interest, prayers, and encouragement. God is showing Himself amazing in terms of the ministry, but also in terms of His tender care.
Blessings,
Em
P.S. So, just a reminder to email me (address above) if you want me to email you the full memory tribute about my dad.
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