Never have I ever felt so helpless my entire life. Honestly, I don’t think that I can do anything for these people without the divine help of God.
I’ve just finished my first two days of ministry. Right now we are still in the early stages of organization, and trying to figure out scheduling so we can finally start going to our ministries, where we will be until Christmas break. So anyways, I spent the last two day at different ministry sites, kind of checking them out, and seeing if there was anything we could do to help get things set up.
The first day we spent at an afterschool program called Ithemba, with kids around 5-12 years old. The scary thing is that the teachers want us to lead their program with afterschool teaching, because the school system doesn’t do very well with teaching math and language, and they need a lot of help. The first day we didn’t exactly come prepared for teaching, so we sang songs and then played with them. They were all very happy to get to play with white Americans, and you could tell that most of them do not get enough love and attention when they’re at home. Playing with them is very hard, because they all want you to make them their favorite and only play with them. But since there are literally 50-100 kids on any given day, it is impossible even for our group to meet the needs of all of them. It is a difficult situation, but we try our best to share the love of Christ and love them all equally.
I had the greatest time playing with some of the young boys who wanted me to carry them around on my shoulders. We made a big game out of it, and I pretended to take them all flying. I also had everyone who wasn’t on my shoulders pretend to be birds and run alongside me so they don’t feel left out. The kids loved the attention, and still wanted more, even after a whole hour of the same thing!
The second day of ministry was a little less exciting, but much more difficult emotionally and spiritually. We went to a health care center called Algoa in a neighboring town to Jeffreys Bay. They have about 200 kids and adults who suffer from severe physical and mental disabilities. Mostly they are simply unable to care for themselves. The problems range anywhere from having cerebral palsy, autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and lost mental ability from a car accident. The center believes that although the patients may have lost some of their mental or physical ability, God still commands us to love him mind, body, and soul. And of course these people are still human beings, so we still believe they can love God in spirit with their souls.
It was still very difficult for everyone on our team to even walk through the care center, because we all felt so helpless. Honestly, being around all these children, most of which were abandoned by their parents, I couldn’t help but think that we can’t do anything for these kids. The needs are really overwhelming. All I know is that whether we have a visible impact or not, we will continue to show the love of Christ as long as have opportunity. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” -1 Corinthians 4:18
