Brought to Light

Hello friends,

For years Ihave been asking God to give me courage and show me how to be bold. I have never actually spoken it out loud or spoken it over my life. I kept asking and asking but never acting out the power that God has given me as one of His children. But that all changed when I was at training camp, with me realizing the lie that my words don’t matter and the truth being that I am worthy to have a conversation. But this all changed when we did an exercise revolving around contextualization. The definition of contextualization is  sharing the gospel in a culturally relevant way. We were given ten minutes to create a skit that showed how we could share the gospel to a fear/power culture. Once the group came together we were told that they would be splitting the team up to create two teams so that they were smaller. We gathered together on the floor in a circle and one of my teammates started sharing about how one of her friends witnessed to a witch doctor in Haiti. At first I was not going to talk about my experience with ministering to witch doctors in Tanzania, Africa, but God told me; “use your words and experience to speak truth and impact the lives of this team. So i started to talk about African culture and how you bring the gospel to that mind set. I shared a small portion of the witch doctor Peter’s story.

 A small portion of Peter’s story is this; last year I was in Tanzania working in a garden in a remote village putting up a fence. That week I was struggling with feeling worthy enough to share God’s truth. We were putting up a fence to keep out the elephants from destroying the crop. As I am rolling out metal fencing with my friend Ashley, the youth pastor at the time came up to us with a question. The youth pastor Paul ask us 

“My brother here Peter has a question”

In my mind I was wondering why a Masai man was talking to us. In their culture we being weman are worth nothing so why is he talking to us… such a God thing.

His question is “Why do you believe in God”

That hit me hard. That is a question no one wishes to be asked but it is the most important question in the world. My response was “ because He is my Father, Comforer, and his love is endless. God has helped me through times that I believed no one loved me or cared what happened to me. He was the one I get strength and hope in everyday. No matter what I do he still loves me and calls me his child.”

Peter continues to ask questions and we answer the questions with Holy spirits help. We couldn’t have answered those questions without Holy Spirit’s help. 

Peter opens up about how since birth he has been dedicated to witchcraft and that he is one of the chiefs of the masai tribe. He kept opening up about his life and sharing about he does not want to lose his family if he became a Christian. 

By that time one of the young guys came over to help answer questions. We talked with Peter saying “when you accept Christ you become a part of a bigger family and even if your family banishes you, you are still a part of a family who loves you and supports you and truly cares about you. If your father does this, you have a Heavenly Father that loves you for you not what you can do for his tribe.” We continue to talk, this conversation lasted about three hours. Within those hours we where able to pour love and light into his dark life. At the end of the conversation he asked if we could talk again but he had to go bring his cows in for the night. We asked him if we could pray over him, he said yes. We prayed over him that God would shine into peter so that he would see that he was living in darkness. He left and we went back to putting up fencing. A couple days later we wanted to talk with Peter before we left the village. So we asked Paul the youth pastor if he knew where Peter lived he said “we would figure it out”. So we started walking and praying but also talking about how we did not want to push salvation on him but let it be a choice he makes. So we make it to his house and he is not home but we meet his wives and children and then we went to his grandmothers house and he was not there either but we met almost his whole family. His aunt called him and told him we were looking for him and she told us that she would make sure he would find us. So we started our trek back to the church and as we get to the church there come peter walking up the path. We all ran to him and started talking and walking back to the main part of the village. 

One of the main statements he said to us was “i am not worthy of God’s love, i have killed people, cast demons into people i am to unworthy” at that moment I look at him and said “ it does not matter what you have done God takes you as you are and He make you a new person. What you have done is in your past not your future. No one is unworthy of God’s love.” He could not believe that someone could still love him with all that he has done. We continued to talk and he kept getting stuck on losing the material things he owned. So I asked him one more question, “in the end where do you want to go heaven or hell?” 

He told us “I want to go to heaven because i know the spirits in hell and they know me and they will hurt me more than any other person. I am scared of that because they know the true me and what i have done” that had me shaken. I had no idea the power that they have in the spiritual realm at that time. In the midst of this conversation I was praying that Holy Spirit and God give me the words to say…

 In the middle of me telling the story our leaders gave us a five minute warning so I had to stop telling the story so that we could get the skit together. We quickly came up with the skit and took Peter’s story as a guideline for the skit. Another teammate mine Mitch asked if he could be the witch doctor and that he felt led to do that part. As a team we agreed and that I would be the main person talking to him. I asked Mitch what he was going to say and he told me he was not going to tell me so that it was spirit led and not scripted. I reluctantly agreed and other teams started performing their skits. We got notified that we had run out of time and that they would try to fit my team’s skit in at a later time that day. As we started walking to lunch, Mitch and I discussed that this needed to be a serious thing because you’re not always going to have happy endings when sharing God’s love with people.

This was the start to me finding my voice in Christ, my passion for African culture, and evangelizing to witch doctors. I will be posting next week on how God worked through my team and this skit to show people what they needed to hear and how I took power over my words and finding my voice. Thank you all for your suport and prayers. 

With love

Lydia Strickland