We Received Our D.I.R.E.s !!!

Hallelujah!!! It’s taken about 3 months, but on January 25, 2008 we received our D.I.R.E.s (temporary resident visas) to travel around and in and out of Mozambique at leisure. Now, we won’t have to leave Mozambique (traveling to Malawi) every 3 months to purchase short-term Visas (this gets to be expensive and time consuming). The immigration office expressed doubt that we’d receive our resident visas due to a few words that the Mozambican Embassy in Washington D.C. forgot to handwrite to indicate the permission to be granted a D.I.R.E. But, He who promises is faithful. Our lives and ministry depend upon the mercy and word of our God. We are truly blessed and excited about the future opportunities that await us since we received our D.I.R.E.s.

Do you remember Lucia, the women filled with devils that I wrote about in a past blog? Well, she was saved last year, delivered, baptized and is living for Jesus. Her village invited some of the missions to come and preach the gospel after seeing the transformation that the Lord has begun to do in her life. Lucia is so filled with joy that she walks more than an hour to church (and another hour back home) in the hot sun and in pouring rain (along with one of her children strapped on her back).

This Saturday evening, Feb 2nd, (~ 11 AM EST) we will begin our first worship event in an Iris Ministry church in Lichinga called Igreja Comunhao na Colheita. This will be an event where we do nothing but worship. Worship will be in Portuguese (I’ve been learning lots of new songs). At first it will mainly include the church leadership and the missionaries from our center. Around the city of Lichinga, God is stirring up a hunger for His presence, power and glory unlike anything we’ve experience to date. We know and believe the Lord will meet us in a new way. Though the leadership in the church has a lot to learn, we are all in the same place of desperation and in dire need of fresh and constant revelation of the glory of God. All of us have chosen to lay ourselves out before the Lord, and see what God does with vessels that are totally abandoned because they have nothing else to do and nothing to prove.

Please pray that the Holy Spirit will transform all of our lives and the lives of the surrounding villages, that the city church will become a spring welling up with new life for the surrounding community, that these times of worship will also help start a fire that will bring the various Christian groups into the unity of the Spirit (to be a people that are Spirit-led and who only exist for the pleasure and presence of the Lord).

Over the last few weeks, I believe we’ve updated you on the “new” things that are happening. Going forward we’ll be looking forward to updating you on testimonies of the great things the Lord is doing in the village and city (especially with the children). Great things have been happening!