Story Time: Unexpected Visitors

The walk from our house to the church wound through suburban Lubumbashi.  I zigzagged through residential alleyways, crossed a dusty soccer field, and passed the blaring music and gaudy decorations of the Facebook Number One Bar on an almost daily basis.  It was a pathway often filled with surprises.

One of those came in the form of an unexpected visitor close to home.  Just as I was about to cut through a taxibus repair stop, I heard a voice behind me shout in English, “Hey man! Hey!”  

His accent wasn’t quite African.  I wondered who this guy might be as I turned around yet ended up seeing your average Congolese guy. 

“You from Canada or somethin’?  Where ya from, man?” 

I stuttered a reply, taken aback at this Congolese man with an African-American voice. 

“Uh… Americ-“ 

“Oh man America?!  I’m from Oakland bro!”

I added a few photos of the Bible school we helped build
a while back.  Here it is, nearly completed on the outside.
Courses to train Congolese pastors about how
to equip their churches for ministry will begin soon!

He said his name was Shawn* and went on to tell a little about himself.  Shawn was born in Kinshasa, the capital city of the DRC on the other side of the country.  His father sent him to the States to grow up in Oakland, CA.  That explained his accent.  He lived there for a while but came back to Africa later on.  While working for a company in South Africa, problems came up against him, family issues blew up, and now he’s stuck in Congo looking to get back to South Africa. 

Pasteur Ilunga, the man in the pool at the left, is the pastor
of the church that planted Pasteur Ezechiel's church.
They gathered new believers together from both of their
churches and another church plant for a baptism service.
Praise God!

Some time later David met Shawn on the street and invited him to the Ruashi church.  He came on his own several times after that.  The guys at the church were really interested in him.  My friend Jean overheard a conversation between Shawn and I and later commented, “He really talks the English of the streets… he finishes everything with ‘man.’”  Haha.

It was great that he was coming to the church, but there was a little issue that bugged David and me.  After each service he would mention meeting up with us sometime to talk about some “real life stuff, ya know.”  David and I would look at each other warily and, considering his situation, guess what he was thinking—ask us for money.  After a while, he did that straight up—first for a passport, then money to get phone credits to call someone to ask for money.  I kept pushing his demands off with excuses about my broke college student state, but I knew I was in a dilemma.  I wanted Shawn to keep coming to church yet feared saying “no” would cut him off.  On the other hand I knew I couldn’t say “yes” and open up a relationship revolving around monetary demands.  I prayed to God for wisdom about handling this.

Boy did the Lord come through. 

A lot of people have asked us what we ate there.
This is what the women of the church cooked us for our 
goodbye meal.  Often there's community bowls of whole
grilled fish like at the bottom left and some sort of greens
like those about to be cooked at the top left.  They
also made a meat-like root cake called kikanda.  So good!

I called Shawn to meet me at church the next Sunday, promising I’d talk to him about giving him a little money for phone credit.  He came to the service and approached me after the shake-hands-with-Pasteur line exiting the church.  I said to myself that if he didn’t have a job, then I couldn’t just give him a few bucks without expecting him to fare well on his own.  So I thought I’d show him a nearby English center and see what he thought about helping there. 

The main starch they had was called fufu.  It's cooked all
over Africa, yet it's called different things and made
with different ingredients.  In Katanga
they made it with corn flour.  There's some in the
yellow bowl.  We grabbed a chunk, formed it into a
ball, and tore off a piece which we used to pinch some
fish or greens.  You can see the fufu ball in Frere Ritch
and Pasteur Ezechiel's hands.

Shawn confessed that a job there might be a little difficult since he didn’t know French too well, but he promised me he would look into it.  He went on to lament his family issues, which reminded me of the sermon we just heard.  The preacher talked about how we need to look at our family origins and cut off the bad practices of our relatives.  I brought that up again and he said that was knocking on his heart too.  I told him that when we believe in Jesus, we become born again into a new family.  I inquired how far he was in doing that.  It seemed from his response that he thought he could get to that point by his religious works—he said he could improve on his prayer life and stuff.  But that’s not the way it works!

Sometimes God just gives you really cool stuff to say.  I explained that God gives us new life not because of anything we do, but because of what He did.  “When we were naturally born, we didn’t do any work.  It was all the mom.  That’s why it’s called labor!  In the same way Jesus did all the work for us on the cross.  All we have to do is receive that and continue in relationship with him.”

We wrapped up the conversation after that.  He gratefully expressed that what I told him was the best thing I could give him after all.  “That’s the way men did things—working for it,” he attested.  He really appreciated the spiritual advice too.  After praying together we parted ways.  I praised God all the way home that he came through and sorted out that situation as best as possible!

*name changed