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On Saturday we visited another village of about 1,000 people called Kapupulu, which is much more scattered and remote than Twashuka. The people build clusters of 4-5 small brick or dirt houses in the midst of the cornfields, since many work as migrant workers, harvesting the corn and soy and other crops. A rutted dirt road connects this village. As we drove in, we passed many walking for many kilometers to get to their homes or their work and picked some up for a ride.
The team just started sowing seeds of prayer and the Word in their community about three years ago, so it’s a newer work. We had the opportunity to meet 3 strong committed women believers, who were the first to come to Christ and be discipled in the village. Since then, in only three years time, 140 people have come to Christ as a result of these women and they now lead around 20 home groups of around 7-12 believers in each group.
The spiritual battle in this village is real. The building where we met for prayer, and to give out Bibles, is one of the women’s home. It was no more than 10 feet from the village beer house where literally 15-20 men where sitting all around inside and outside, drinking. Some of them were drunk and we were interrupted in the meeting several times.
Jean, a beautiful, kind 50’s something hostess of the house fellowship, cultivates and sells vegetables and sees the possibilities of change for this community through the power of Christ. She has even prayerfully formulated a plan to work with the women to develop a cooperative where they work together to plant and harvest and then sell their vegetables together.
Jean sees the problems in her community, the generational sin of alcoholism, being repeated from the mothers and fathers to the children. She and the others in the fellowship are on the front lines of the battles between light and darkness, and they are continually in prayer.
But she has the hope of Christ. Already some in Kapupulu are changing because of God’s Word. Their prayer is for radical transformation in their community. Please pray for that with her and us. Though we are not there, we can lift these prayers to the Father on their behalf. As we can see from the village we wrote about yesterday (Twashuka), God is in the business of changing lives and releasing people from strongholds, no matter our economic or social status, and prayer is our biggest weapon.
During our visit, we gave her three Bibles in English. She was glad for them, but wished we had brought about 30 more in their native language Bemba. We then told her about the Bible Torches we brought over that have the Bible loaded in audio in Bemba, Lozi and English, but that we forgot to bring it this time.
Near the end of our visit with Jean, Aaron rushed in and said, “You’re not going to believe what I found in the back of my truck!” He handed her one of the Bible Torches, which we had told her about but thought we forgot. Aaron put it on the roof on his truck to charge (since it’s solar powered) and then when he drove off, it slid into the pickup part of the truck. She was overjoyed, her smile gleamed and her eyes began to show with joy. “This was meant for me!”, she said proudly and immediately put it right around her neck.
