Hello Friends!

     I hope that you are all doing well. I have not heard from many of you in a while, but trust that God is doing lots in each of your lives! I know that my life has entered into a very strange spell as of late, as I begin to really close up things here and look towards heading home. Let me share with you as best I can…

     The Alpha Weekend that I asked you to pray for in the last e-mail (although it seems like a VERY long time ago now) was good! We went to the beach and watched some pretty cool videos and I think that God really did some things in some people’s lives. It was a gorgeous setting as well—very inspiring! :-)

     Megan and I had an awesome time with our friend, Cynthia, who came up to visit from Cape Town. After the week she was here, we all headed back down to Cape Town with some Rhodes University students. The trip was really awesome! We were helping out Mike and Amy Boone, who are missionaries to the Xhosa people in CT. Megan and I knew them from their time here in G-town while they were in language school, and they are just really wonderful people, and very encouraging to work with. We worked at an orphanage with kids from Angola, DRC, and a few other places. We also helped at a school run by a church in one of the townships. I enjoyed seeing some of the missionaries who are in Cape Town and it was also really awesome for me to get to spend time with my Rhodes friends who have meant so much to me here—just a really special time!

     Since returning from Cape Town things were supposed to have calmed down, but how much fun could that be? What I am mainly speaking of is a small house fire that we had shortly after returning from Cape Town and which managed to turn our plans of an easy going few weeks upside down. Now before anyone starts to freak out, lets take a moment and praise our amazing God, who in His mercy, chose to really protect us and make the situation not NEARLY as bad as it could have been.

     We were actually not even at home when it happened, but eating ice cream with our youth in town. We got a call from our alarm system guys informing us that our house was on fire and we needed to go home IMMEDIATELY. So we raced through town to the church where our cars were parked (with our always-adorable GAP kids running right there alongside of us so we looked like a gang or something—people were definitely staring!) Upon arriving at our house, we found that the fire had actually been put out by the Hi-Tech alarm guy.

     Apparently, one of the alarm system guys arrived at the house, saw the fire in Megan’s room, hoisted a few bricks through the window, ripped down the burglar bars, found the dogs’ water bucket on the OTHER side of the house, thrust it through the window, and put out the fire (please try to picture a burly Arikaaner as you envision the scene—I know it will be hard for most of you!) We were MOST grateful, as the fire really only got one bookshelf, scorched a wall, burnt some of the rug, and consumed some of Megan’s stuff. (And as it turns out, melted digital cameras and other burnt objects serve as quite the conversation pieces).   It also left soot on everything in the house, but at the end of the day, it just wasn’t THAT bad! Praise God! It also has given us lots to do this week, a week that would have otherwise been very devoid of any sort of work. I KNOW the Morrises’ house is cleaner than before the fire!

     Aside from fighting fires, I have been trying to clean and sort through some things in preparation for leaving (this has been met with only moderate success!) I have also had a lot of time to reflect on my time here, and that is really awesome. God has definitely been showing me a lot and doing a lot in my heart.

Prayer Requests:

• Tonight, Megan leaves on a bus to travel to Jo’burg where she will catch a plane to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is quite exciting, as she has felt the Lord leading her in this direction for a while. She is praying about possibly returning there after some months spent in the States. Please pray that she will have clarity from the Lord in what He is asking of her in all of this. Pray that her time spent there with the missionaries in Kinshasa will be blessed! She will be returning to South Africa on October 10th.
  
  
• Pray for me as I am alone in this time. Pray that this will be a time that I can really reflect on the Lord and have a sweet time with him. Pray that I will be constructive and get things done towards leaving and really be able to spend quality time with my friends here.
  
  
• I teach two more times at Victoria Primary School, (supposedly) on October 4th and October 17th. Please be praying for these times as I will be sharing a lot of the True Love Waits material with the girls. I really feel like the Lord has allowed me to have a unique and good relationship with these girls. Pray that He would really speak through me during my final times with them.
  
  
• Pray for me personally.  It is going to be really hard to leave this place.  God has given me a supernatural peace about going—I know it is the right time, but I also know its going to be hard.  Pray that I will be completely satisfied in Him, and rely on Him for everything I need!

Thanks so much for your prayers! I really appreciate them, especially in these final days in South Africa. I will try to update you one more time before heading home, and I look forward to seeing many of you in about a month!


For God’s Glory,
heather :-)
 

See Photos from Heather Here