Community

As my book club can attest to I love talking about community and the importance of it. It has become even more real this summer. We are often isolated by our language, skin color, and age at the centre. Thankfully we are still friends and enjoy each other’s company, but it was refreshing to be part of a community with the Mozambique team. There were two teams, one from Cape Town and one from Pietermaritzburg. From Cape Town there was Ian, Ian, Sarah, Sara, Jess, Jess, Nicky, Andrew, Bronwyn, Tamryn, and Bryan. We met up with Alistair, Mark, and the Peitermaritzburg team in Jo’Burg. From Peitermaritzburg there was Mike, Lovat, Hannah, Heather, Jenny, Jono, and Batung. Most of us were youngsters, in their 20s. Jenny was the oldest, being older than our parents and Andrew was in his late 30s. Lots of energy, lots of laughter, lots of jokes, lots of good times. We were both semi-surprised to naturally gravitate back to each other throughout the day. One day when we were in separate cars, I missed Sarah a lot and kept thinking, oh I have to tell Sarah this and this…so we’ll probably experience some type of withdrawal when we go back.

Anyway back to the community. It was awesome to have the sharing times in the morning and afternoon. Hearing and sharing what God is doing in us and the team was great and refocused our purpose of being here. Both of us love getting to know people on deeper levels, and loved having this time for just that (the car trips helped a lot too for getting close quick).

It is such a beautiful thing to see communities support, challenge, encourage, be invested, and love each other. God’s relational nature shines through.

Captions: 1. lots of Moz love 2. Mike, Sarah, Sara, Manwele, Tamiryn, Brian, Kayeightu