Be soil, not dirt.

In preparation for our Zambia trip our whole team, along with other Harding students, spent 2 weeks at a class called HUT. It was out in the Arkansas bush, the middle of nowhere. Harding has built this place that is a simulation of third world country villages. The point of the class was to learn about missions and different ways to help people. To help us do that we spent 2 weeks living in these villages. No electricity, no running water, no completely enclosed housing, no floors. We did day labor and got paid that day. We used that money to buy our own food from the market. We cooked our own meals...and by "cooked" I mean kill the chicken, clean the chicken, cook it over an open fire. We tarred the roof, nailed more boards onto our walls, and tried to keep our dirt floors from becoming mud pits if the rain was too hard (which it was). We jumped in the creek if we wanted to be clean. We rescued people from an earthquake and had to keep them alive with the little we had. We had to find a place under the stars to sleep and hope we had food to eat when everything we had was destroyed by the earthquake. We had babies (water balloons) and had to keep them safe (from popping). We built our own water purification systems, gardened our own food, dug our own fish farms, made our own cheese and soap from the goats we milked twice a day, kept our own bees, built our own earthbag house, and the list goes on...
I wish I could talk about everything I learned while I was in that class but it would take days and days. I went into that class knowing that I was going to Africa and came out of it truly understanding what that means. I went into it knowing that I was going to help people and came out of it knowing exactly HOW to help people. I went into knowing that God had His hand on this whole trip and came out of it seeing a tiny view of what He was going to be doing through us. I went into it knowing one person and came out of it with a family. I remember sitting around the fire on the third or fourth night with the 5 other people in my Hue Hue family reading the Bible to each other and talking about our experiences that we've already had. A few days earlier we had been put in a family, crossed the "border" into our country, and made ourselves comfortable in our little home. It's amazing how quickly a bond forms and how quickly you gain pride for what is yours. This was OUR home. If we were to have to live in this house in the US we would hate it. but we were proud of it and we grew to love it very quickly. It was also OUR dinner. We worked hard for this food. We cooked it ourselves. It didnt matter how it tasted or how little of a portion we got. It was good and we ate every bite. We didnt take anything for granted because we realized how blessed we were to have the little that we did. And whats amazing is that we still had a lot more than other people around the world.
We're so blessed. We dont realize how much we have until we have to live with less. God gave me a reality check during these 2 weeks. He put me in a place where I saw His power everywhere, where everything I learned was centered around helping people in His name, and where the people were more in love with Him than I could ever imagine. We shared our life stories, we prayed together, we read the Bible together, and we stayed up late sitting under the stars singing and praising our God. The crazy thing about it?...that all happened in 2 weeks. I'm about to spend 3 months with that same family growing and learning and glorifying God in many more ways.

43 DAYS!