New Website!

We finally got our original website back up and this time we have our own domain. So from now on to view all future blog updates and find out more about our ministry go to www.thechroniclesofmeng.com

Family, Friends, and A whole lot of Ministry!

Wow! The past three months have flown by and it is hard to believe we are already finished with our time out on the west coast. To say the least we have had one the most successful and busy itinerating trips that we have ever had. We have spoken in churches and home fellowships all around the Bay Area and have even traveled up to Oregon to minister. All along the way the Lord has proved Himself faithful, right down to the smallest details He has really provided in amazing ways!

Unfortunately due to the busy schedule I have been having a tough time trying to keep up with our communications, so today I am going to be posting a number of updates sharing just a few of the things that have been going on with us. Even sharing a recording of one the services that I had the opportunity minister.

Thank you to everyone who has been praying for us during this time and to all that we were able to visit with thank you for taking the time to see us and allow us to share what the Lord has been doing! To those we didn’t get to see this time around thank you for your continued prayers and for your continued support even when we are apart!

In Christ,

Matt

Crayons, Oranges, and a Fiery Furnace – by Angela

Some of the kids lined up to get dinner.

Last week I had the opportunity to teach the Bible lesson at our feeding scheme in Phokeng. I haven’t been out there a lot lately, mostly because I was in the later months of pregnancy and then adapting to a new addition. But now I’ve got it all down and I’m ready for another challenge. A few weeks ago I went with our team out there and just hung out while Sarah taught. She told the girls about Eve and how she had a choice. Unfortunately Eve made the wrong choice and chose to disobey God. All week long I was thinking about the choices we make. In Deuteronomy 30:19 it says, “…I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants,… I began thinking that this would be a good theme for the kids. I want them to know that each day presents choices to be made. Either to honor God or satisfy our flesh. Either to choose blessing or the curse. One day I was listening to some music and a song by Shane & Shane began playing. It’s is called “Burn us up”, a song about Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego. Now, they made a choice! They chose not to bow down to the statue Nebuchadnezzar had built. They chose instead to honor God and worship Him only. To the point of putting their lives on the line! I love what they said before they were thrown in the furnace; Daniel 3:17&18 “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” That statement sealed their fate. They stood up for what they believed in no matter the consequence or what anyone thought, even the king that could have them killed. Nebuchadnezzar did try to kill them, but God saved them!

This is what I taught last Wednesday. I printed out some coloring sheets about the story and colored them in myself. (It was also a fun time with my kids as they sat beside me and shared my pencils) As I told the story I put up the corresponding picture. I think this helped the kids visualize the story and understand it better. At the end I gave them their own paper to color. I passed around crayons, and it blessed me tremendously to see how much they enjoyed something as simple as coloring.

That day I decided to bring out a bag of oranges as well. I had about 30 or so. There were only 23 kids there that day, so I had a few left over. I have never seen kids so excited about oranges! When they realized there were a few extras they began doing whatever they could to get my attention to get another. I had them answer questions about the story for the reward. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw them peeling the oranges and smiling as they ate them. What a blessing these children are to me. I’m just getting to know most of them, but I look forward to teaching them more about who God really is and learning from them myself.

Going to the States…

Due to the fact that our base is not running a school right now and our next one doesn’t start till March 2010 our staff have all decided to take this opportunity to return to our respective home countries for a time of refreshing and support raising. That said Angela and I have prayed and feel that now is a good time for us to make a trip to the States to visit our friends and family and those who have supported us so faithfully while we have been here these past two years.

We have a few prayer requests that we would like to pass along to everyone and hope that you would keep us lifted up as we are preparing to come.

- We need roughly $6000 for round trip airfare for our family plus a van rental for a week
- We are praying and believing for a minivan to use while we are in the states as we have many states to visit and renting a vehicle for the entire time we are in the states would be very costly(roughly $2000 per month not counting mileage and gas).
- We are looking for opportunities to preach, teach, and minister(musically and otherwise). If anyone has either a home group, cell group, Wed. or Sunday Service, Coffeehouse etc. that we could come and teach &/or minister please let us know. We are looking to get our schedule set in the next two or three weeks.

Thanks everyone for your prayers and support!

Welcome to our new Blog

We just wanted to welcome everyone to our new blog site. For various reasons we had to make a switch to wordpress. We hope you enjoy our posts and look forward to sharing with everyone all that the Lord is doing in and through us in life and ministry!

While we don’t have our whole archive from our previous blog site I have included our three most recent postings just in case anyone didn’t get a chance to read them.

Blessings!

Reflections from Mozambique

The Best Repair Shop In Town!

In my last post I said that I would write about my trip as a whole in my next blog. So here it is…Start to finish this trip was a lesson in learning to trust the Lord in everything and ultimately to surrender to Him and His plan. To be sure this was an amazing trip but to illustrate fully I need to begin before I ever left for Mozambique.

Actually I need to go back to when I was first asked to teach. Ang and I were attending the YWAM Member Care Course in Midrand and one of our fellow students happened to be the base leader from the YWAM Dondo base in Mozambique. Gil asked me if I would prayerfully consider coming and teaching on their DTS in Dondo. After a week of prayer and discussing it with Ang I decided to tell him yes. At the time I told him not to worry about helping with my travel costs that I would cover my own expenses. We had started the year with a couple good months of support and the exchange rate was much higher then so I figured I should be able to cover the costs relatively easily if I saved up.

As the months came and went I began to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to just save up for the trip but that I would actually need to raise support for it. I started to wonder if maybe I had made a mistake in agreeing to go, but felt the Lord kept saying it would be ok. So I prepped my teaching and readied myself as if I was going. A few weeks before I was to go Ang and I sent out a petition email for the trip. I was amazed that within a few days of the email I not only had my full budget raised for the trip but we had an extra $170 come in for it! Little did I know that having extra would be a test of my faith.

You see I figured if I could stick to my budget or better yet come in under budget that we could use the excess to pay for getting our Jeep serviced, something that we really needed to do. In addition to the testing in finances I was being forced to rely on the Lord in other ways. When I first agreed to go I was hoping to have Derek, my base leader, or one of our other staff go with me on the trip. Even though they wouldn’t be doing any of the actual teaching, somehow having someone else with me made the task of going to a new country and teaching seem a little easier. But in the end the Lord closed the door for the others and I was left to travel by myself. The time came to leave and I set out unsure of what to expect.

My first day of travel was relatively uneventful, save getting delayed by traffic and construction. I met Lisidio, the brother of one of the YWAM Dondo staff, who would accompany me from the Mozambique border to Dondo and back. Unfortunately he didn’t speak all that much English(Portuguese is the national language of Mozambique) so most of our 30 plus hours in the car together during the trip were spent rather quietly. I ended up staying the first night at a guesthouse run by a pastor in Maputo where I met an American missionary couple who are living and working in Mozambique. They served me dinner and I had a wonderful time fellowshipping with them.

The next day was when the real testing began. Now remember I was doing my best to stay on budget but not only that I was driving with someone who spoke very little English. We got a fairly early start, hitting the road around 8:30am and for the first several hours our trip was a smooth one. But after passing through the small coastal town of XaiXai (pronounce Shy-Shy) I hit what would be the first of several very bad stretches of road. Prior to my trip I had asked Gil what the roads were like in Mozambique and he assured me that they were good. That was actually true of about 1000 km of the 1200 km between Maputo and Dondo. Unfortunately the 200 km of bad road was the worst I had ever seen in my life and worse I was driving our little Honda sedan!

We made it through the first stretch ok and things seemed to be going well until about halfway through our trip to Dondo when I hit another bad piece of “road”. Even going slow I was having trouble maneuvering through the countless pits and potholes that filled our path. Several times I hit deep potholes head on unable to avoid them. On one such occasion I knew I had damaged a rim, but as tire didn’t seem to have gone flat and we were in the middle of nowhere at the time I had to keep pressing on. When at last we reached the next little “town” and stopped to fill up on petrol I checked the tire. Sure enough it was very low and the rim had a horrible dent. I knew if we didn’t do something soon it would go completely flat and ruin the tire. We found out from the attendant at the station that there was a tire “shop”(see the picture above) about 2 km up the road.

As we pulled up I was very skeptical but Lisidio jumped out and after a short conversation with the repair guy in Portuguese the man set to work removing the damaged rim and hammering it back out with a sledgehammer. The whole thing, including refilling the tire with air, took maybe 20-25 minutes and cost me roughly the equivalent of $6 US. All in all I wasn’t too upset, except that now it was getting dark and we were still 500 km from Dondo. As we set out again I had a sense of foreboding that we hadn’t seen the worst yet. Unfortunately I was right!

The next 100 km were the worst stretch of road in the entire trip, many of the potholes were so large that had I driven into them I never would have gotten the car out! To make matters worse it was now night and in the middle of Mozambique there are no street lights in fact there are no lights of any kind so it was pitch black. It seemed as if the headlights were only candles for all the good they did illuminating the road. I had slowed to driving between 15-30kph now and with each pothole and bump that I hit my frustrations were growing because I could see that excess trip income slipping away. It was a strange mix of emotions that I was dealing with. Anger and bitterness towards the base leader for “misleading” me about the roads, frustration with myself questioning whether I heard the Lord right about driving instead of taking a bus, fear wondering if we would be stranded out in the middle of nowhere.

At some point the Lord began dealing with the root of my frustrations. It was all a matter of trust. You see even though Ang and I have been “living by faith” for most of our marriage the Lord was showing me through these circumstances that my trust really hasn’t been in Him. At least not entirely. At first I was upset that “my” car was getting damaged and what if one of these potholes really messed it up to where it wasn’t drivable at all. I was really working myself up over this when the Lord asked me a question in that still small voice of His,…”Who’s car is this?”…I ignored it at first, content to wallow in my frustrations…then He asked again a little more firmly…”Who’s care is this?” I knew the answer but didn’t want to let it go. The truth was it was His car. His to give and His to take in any way He wished to that. He had directed me to drive and thus if He chose to take the car via a pothole I had no reason to complain as it belonged to Him in the first place. This was my first lesson of the week.  And I would like to say that I stopped complaining immediately but it took me most of the rest of our journey that night to get my heart in line with what my head knew to be true.

The rest of the week the Lord began slowly bringing up other things in my life that I knew I needed to lay down. One by one He would reveal things and then patiently wait for me to give them over. At one point He even gently but firmly required me to lay down my wife and children again.

Dondo DTS

Matt teaching on worship

For those who don’t know I just recently had the privilege of teaching on the DTS school at the YWAM Dondo base in Dondo, Mozambique. It was a very awesome time of ministry and actually there is so much to write from the trip as a whole that I will be breaking it into two different blog posts. In this post I will focus mainly on my time teaching and ministering to the students of the Dondo DTS.

The school in Dondo had 9 students all of whom were from the surrounding villages. Going into the week I was a little unsure of what to expect as all of the students spoke only Portuguese and so during class and ministry times I would be working through a translator. While I have preached before with a translator it has never been for this length of time and usually even in those situations the people at least spoke a small amount of English. Ultimately this was a huge blessing to me as it really caused me to rely upon the Holy Spirit to lead me and to help overcome the communication barrier.

In the end God showed up in a great way, the teaching sessions flowed and there were times that I could tangibly sense the presence of the Lord in my teaching and things that I was speaking I knew it was Him speaking through me. That said my favorite memories from the week of teaching and ministry were the two times that I got to pray over the staff and the students and speak words from the Lord into their lives.

The first was on Tuesday morning during the schools normal intercession time. I had asked the base leader if it would be possible for me to pray over the staff and students and he agreed to let me have that time to do it. It was amazing! I started by asking one of the staff to lead everyone in worship while I went around to pray over people and though I could not understand what was being sung the presence of the Lord was strong. As I began working my way around the room the Lord began to give me specific words for different people in the group.

In particular He gave me a word for a Brazilian couple who are staff for the school. The Lord showed me a vision of them with several small children that I sensed were there own. Since I knew they had no kids and she wasn’t pregnant I wasn’t sure this was something that they even wanted or were thinking about. But after I had finished praying for everyone I asked them through and interpreter if they wanted children, that I felt the Lord was saying that He was going to give them the children they desired. They began smiling and told me that not only did they want children, but they had already picked out names! It was really cool to see that I really was hearing clearly from the Lord.

The other opportunity I had came at the end of the week. One practical exercise that I had students do is to lay face down before the Lord in silence for a time. I will put on music in the background, but the point of this time is for them to be waiting on the Lord. It is a sign of submission and humility and the times that I have done it in the past the Lord has done great things. This time I was truly blown away by what He did. After the students had finished the time of worship I asked them what the Lord spoke to them. Every single one had received a vision from the Lord! As I sat listening I was amazed, but even more so because as I was listening the Lord began to give me the interpretations for the visions! One by one the Lord allowed me to interpret for the students the things He was speaking. With several it was confirming things He had spoken the week before through another teacher.

After that I had the students each go find a place to be alone with the Lord as I felt He had more He wanted to do and speak to them. Later on two of them came to me about the things the Lord had spoken and they each told me a scripture that the Lord had shown them that they weren’t not sure what it meant. I sat in awe as the scriptures they had were direct confirmation of specific words that the Lord had given me for these two students before I came! Praise the Lord He is so awesome, how wonderful it is to be used by Him!

Well for now I am going to bring this post to a close and later I will post about the things the Lord was teaching me personally throughout my trip, until then, blessings!…

Catching a Vision

Ministering in Palapye

Having just returned from my fourth trip to Botswana in the last year and the second trip to Palapye, I feel like the Lord is starting to give me a vision for what He desires to do with me there. In our time there Derek and I have begun to see that there is a desperate need amongst the Tswana people to have solid teachers and basic biblical teaching.

In many ways we are seeing what the writer of Hebrews was talking about when he said of the Hebrews “We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!” (Heb. 5:11-12)

Though there are many churches and many pastors throughout Botswana we are seeing that the people have very little Bible knowledge. Moreover, what little they do have is often mixed with traditional African beliefs which leaves them confused and in bondage.

As we have been praying about this for strategy to help bring change we feel like the Lord has been directing us to focus on the pastors. One thing we would like to start doing is providing these pastors with resources and teachings to build them up in their understanding of the Word. We also want to help provide them with accountability as most of them have no one inputing in their lives. Lastly we want to help those that we can become more established financially. Many of them live off of little or no support. Pastor Peter in Palapye for example, he and wife and two kids live off of roughly $200 US a month. One of the ways we have helped him and his family is to build an extension to their chicken coup which will allow them to keep up to 75 chickens at a time which they can sell to people in the community to help raise more support. If all goes well this could nearly double their monthly income.

As of right now we are still praying through how this will work but we believe the Lord is beginning to give us a vision for transforming the nation of Botswana!