Motivate: v.t., 1: to provide with a stimulus to action. In Swahili, ‘tunahamasisha’ means, “we are motivated.”
June 2010
Dear Friends and Family,
Many of you may have heard that Mr. Motorcycle traveled to Tanzania last month with Mark Bruner, Avant’s Short Cycle Church Planting Director, a former missionary in East Africa and one of the mentors in his internship. Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Motorcycle’s trip journal:
“Stuffed like sardines in a twenty six passenger bus we got as comfortable as possible then we proceeded to bump along, literally. We had a two hundred seventy three kilometer drive, roughly two hundred miles. On this particular trip we bounced along over alternating dirt and tarmac or asphalt roads for about six and a half hours… After breakfast our day started with a meeting with Silas Kezakubi, the Tabora region Bishop for the Africa Inland Church. He’s a jovial man, excited about what God wants to do in the Tabora region. There are few churches there and Silas is excited about partnering with us to establish the church in a largely unreached area. This particular area is very dark spiritually. After visiting in depth with Nancy Giddens, a director at Mount Meru University in Arusha, we found out why. The country of Tanzania was the key piece of the East Africa slave trade. There were several routes that the slavers used to bring captured people out to Zanzibar where they would be auctioned off, then loaded on ships for their final destinations. It is along these routes, that there is a very depressed and dark atmosphere. It is also in some of these areas that we are looking at as potential ministry points...”
Mr. Motorcycle came back motivated and ready to get to Tanzania to start language school and prepare for the Short-Cycle Team to come. Stephanie (who was glad to not have to make such a long journey in her state) was happy to have her husband back after nearly two weeks and to get ready to have their first child.
After spending the past several months speaking in churches and with groups of friends, sharing the vision the Lord has begun to give to us, we are urged on by the faces and pictures we can now link with Tanzania. We are praying the Lord will increase our burden for these people and this land and prepare our hearts for our upcoming move.
Right now we are at 1/3 of our monthly support goal and we have just over half of our vehicle and set-up fund for Tanzania. It is always difficult to estimate,
but we are still hoping to be in Tanzania the very end of September/beginning of October. With this timeline, we would be arriving just in time to settle into temporary housing and begin our first segment of language school. It seems to us that this would be good timing for us to arrive in the country, but we are trying to remain flexible to what God may want to do in and through us in our time here in the US.
Thank you for your continual prayers, financial gifts, and friendship. We look forward to continuing to share our journey with you!
Blessings,
Mr. Motorcycle and Stephanie
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