Little Update…

-AFRICABOUND-

Update from the Macks
May 2008

“Bring your heart with its profoundest emptiness, its most startling discovery of sin, its lowest frame, its deepest sorrow, and sink it into the depths of the Saviour’s love… Christ’s love touching your hard heart, will dissolve it; touching your cold heart, will warm it; touching your sinful heart, will purify it; touching your sorrowful heart, will soothe it; touching your wandering heart, will draw it back to Jesus. Only bring your heart to Christ’s love.”

- Octavius Winslow, The Sympathy of Christ (Harrisonburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1994), 165.

It is hard to believe we have been in Africa almost a year already. We are so thankful to the Lord for the way in which He has demonstrated His faithfulness and love to us over the past year. We have seen once again that while God does not always act the way we might expect Him to or even at first want Him to, God always, always does what is best.

I thought I might share some of the highlights from the past few months as well as some prayer requests. We are so grateful for your love, encouragement and prayers for us in South Africa.

Moozie and Zanele have been such a wonderful addition to the family. While they have only been with our family three months now we cannot imagine life without them. They both came to us from a home for HIV orphans in Johannesburg that was over-capacity.

We have been busy doing investigative work by meeting with directors of various orphanages and mercy-ministries in our area in order to develop a plan for caring for children that makes the best biblical sense. A number of possible future opportunities have come up as a result, such as teaming up with several other South African missionaries to help develop an orphanage on property twenty five minutes from our home and potentially helping with a new Christian school specifically for orphans. But while opportunities like these are exciting and we will see where the Lord takes them, in the meantime we have become convinced that the best approach for us to actively pursue at this time is to become a place of safety ourselves where we care for six to ten children within our own home on a transitional basis while facilitating foster-care and adoption of orphans and providing training for foster-care and adoptive parents. This will include the renovation of our home as well as the purchase of a bigger vehicle. One thing at a time, but we are by God’s grace moving forward. We already have several parents that are interested in bringing children into their families.

I have spent the last two months teaching a course on the importance of mercy at the church (material which I am working on putting together into book form) and people seem very interested in moving forward to serve those in need. We are meeting with a group of individuals to form a mercy team in June. The opportunities are endless!

We are excited to have a missionary intern come to live at our home and work alongside of us beginning in August of this year, Lord willing. We have a number of different ideas for him and cannot wait to see how God uses him in our lives as well. One of the opportunities we are most excited about is an Adult Literacy Program in a local township with a pastor we are working alongside of.

Please pray for this pastor, by the way. His name is Thabo. We are going to begin a more intensive training program/partnership with him in the next several months.

I am happy to be able to say that I finished my doctoral studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The only thing is that now every time one of the children is sick they expect me to be able to do something about it!

This upcoming summer looks like it will be fairly busy. Besides preaching and pastoring at Grace Fellowship Church, I will teach Biblical Counseling to houseparents at Bethesda Orphanage in May and July. I will also be traveling to Uganda at the end of May to participate in a God, Law and Justice Conference in Kampala.

I thought you might enjoy reading a description of the conference:

“We have been invited by George Kasozi, chairman of the law department and author of the leading textbooks in Uganda on religious freedom, to partner with the faculty and alumni of Uganda Christian University in this first ever event.

In addition, to this three day conference the trip would include several site visits with leading Christians serving in the executive, judicial, and local law enforcement bodies of Uganda.

Opportunities to participate in church based prison and orphans ministry will also be included. We will also are scheduling visits to ministries such as The International Justice Mission, Restore International, Compassion International, and The Africa Foundation.

Site visits will allow our team to spend time with ourcounterparts within Uganda to explore innovative ways Christians can use their vocation in law and government.”

I am also excited to be able to teach on the Christian Response to the AIDS Crisis at a Christian Worldview Conference in August and then Grace School of Ministry will begin again the fall. We are especially excited about this upcoming class. It looks like there will be several students from as far away as Nigeria and Zambia joining us.

I think this is probably getting a bit long and some of you may be wondering when I am going to stop writing. It is just that I haven’t talked with some of you in so long and there is so much to say. We are very happy in God here in Africa and we feel very deeply that apart from His strength we can absolutely do nothing which is why we would ask that you would please continue to support us through your prayers on our behalf!

Josh, Marda and family