Our Journey Thus Far: March 8th

We went the the morning service this morning.  It was really long and we had to sit on wooden benches with straight backs, not really the most comfortable seating ever. haha It was kind of hard to understand what the speaker was saying because the translator kept getting confused.  The crowd kept having to correct the translator which was pretty funny.  It would be so nice to understand french!  Maybe someday if we come back, I will be able to learn till then!  After the service we came back the compound and rested.  

The evening service was a lot of fun.  Worship was really good, and there was a lot of dancing.  Nat and I even danced some! haha Pastor Robinson finished his message on the resurrection.  Which I must say was very good, he definitely emphasized how it applies to us today.  Then there was an invitation for people to who wanted to accept God to come forward.  I haven't tried to count the people in my pictures yet but there were probably 125 at least!  Yay!  It's so exciting that so many people are committing their lives to Jesus!  My guess is that somewhere between 475-575 people have accepted Jesus!  I love the way they follow up the commitments here; they have counselors from each of the sections of town come to the front and then call the name of the section and then the people go to that counselor and they will have them as a mentor.  I think its so cool because the point of sharing Jesus isn't to just get a big number of converts, it is for people to have transformed lives living having a relationship with the one who loves them more than anyone in this world!  The counselors really have the opportunity to help along the new believers.  After that Pastor Robinson called forward those who needed prayer for healing.  It seemed like everyone in the place tried to come to the front.  A bunch of people were healed, a few came up onto the stage and shared about what they were feeling.  One girl came up who had malaria, she said that she has been feeling really sick recently and that she had just accepted Jesus the night before.  When we prayed for healing she said the pain left! So Praise God!  Another that I remember was that a girl had an infection in her legs and couldn't walk without a crutch.  She also had just accepted Jesus and she shared that she wanted to get on her knees when she accepted him, but it hurt too much when she tried.  Well she walked the whole way up onto the stage without her crutch.  She was jumping around! It was so awesome!  At the very end of the service there were a few girls in chairs who couldn't walk, so we went over and prayed for them.  I'm not sure why they couldn't walk, the one girl regained strength in her legs and was walking around and standing by the time we left.  Natalie also had the opportunity to pray for a little girl who had AIDs and a heart condition.  It is so sad seeing all of the sick children here, we are so blessed in America to have vaccines and good medical care.  It's hard to not feel guilty about what we have in America.  We have so much excess.  For example, they don't have any sort of grocery store here.  There are tons of little food vendors along the road and that is it.  One lady who is on the ministry team with us is from Nigeria and she was asking me about America and what we normally eat there.  I honestly had trouble thinking of one thing that is in a majority of our meals because we have so many options and can have whatever we want.  When we were coming home from the service this evening, we were in the bus and Nat was sitting by a window and it was open.  We stopped and some guy reached in and touched her arm and said something in French.  We were like what?? and then the bus kept driving.  So that was interesting, it may sound really scary but it was actually more funny than scary.  I have been taking a lot of photos and can't wait to share them.  Our internet here is sort of slow so I will wait till we get back to the states.