I nearly got the entire way through the last Harry Potter; and we officially voted against using Dutch airlines again due to raw fish salads and, Kara’s favorite, water chestnut salads. (Water chestnuts are about the only food Kara can’t stand. We never imagined you could make an entire salad out of them.)

Word from the church plant team in Mozambique is that by Sunday
morning after continued house visits and open air preaching, they had
around 60 adults and children on Sunday morning for the first service.
Please, pray for Sambo because the hard work of pastoring is just
beginning for him.

We have tons to think through. No lights breaking through the clouds
and issuing a quest for the holy grail or anything, but I think Kara
and I both walk away with some seed ideas of what we could contribute
to in Africa. Thanks for traveling with us.

Here’s a new batch of photos covering Kenya.

http://picasaweb.google.com/chris.wynn/KenyaPhotos

The time at the children’s home has been illuminating. We’ve watched what a truely well run and loving home can look like.

A team of doctors visited yesterday, whom Kara helped checkup the children and local villagers, remarked, “We’ve not seen such health children in all our visits here in Kenya.” They have done clinics in the slums and the rural villages.

This testifies to the key leadership of Eunice, and the commitment of the staff.

We visit a few of the partnership of the children’s home today: the church, the larger children’s home that inspired Eunice, and the government home where Eunice has rescued many of the children.

It’s still raining. Forecast is for partly cloudy tommorrow. I’m hoping to finish my inside shooting mostly today, and get outside tomorrow.

One thing I have learned from this is that running a media ministry from the U.S., though with it’s benifits, would face this same prohibitation. Because of the cost of travel, you are at the mercy of factors like weather or health of key people (poor Eunice has been sick). There are arguments on both sides for where best to do the work I want to do.

I think the deciding factor for me is Kara. As I’ve listened to her process, it is her heart to be with the people she is helping at length. She sees the value of traveling clinics, but the inherant weakness she sees resides in the lack of ability to make a long term difference. She has said she prefers to come along side local visions for a clinic with local people committed to it, and help enable them to make it happen or happen the best it can.

We stayed the past two nights with Steven Mairori, the executive director of International Christian Ministries in Katale, a bible training school for rural pastors. I have to say, the ministry he showed us excited both Kara and I. We also saw the Circle of Light project both in the village and at the depot, also a very impressive an inspiring work.

Kenya road are terrible; the people are as friendly as they come.

We’re at the Tumaini orphanage now. I’m scratching my head on how to shoot promotional video footage of children who want to crawl all over me and hold the camera. It’s also raining on and off, which would be fine except for the grey cloud cover. I’m praying the clouds break tomorrow so that I can do justice to the beauty of this place and the people.

We met the two little children Kara and I sponsor. I’ve got pictures. Kara looks good with a baby on the lap. I just look nervous.

Kara gets to help a group of doctors tomorrow run a day health clinic for the community. It will be held at the local church … a beautiful, half finished building.

Please, pray for our continued clarity. We’re so happily consumed with all the relationships and traveling; we have only dialogued a little. I know one thing. I’m loving the chance to create something for this orphanage that might help them; please, pray the clouds part for me.

Also, it wouldn’t hurt praying for safety. This camera, expectedly, draws a lot of attention. I’m doing my best not to be foolish, but I also want to walk away with the right shots. We were followed by a group fo guys in a back street of this village today. I put away my camera. White guy, big camera … I might as well wear a day glow shirt with a dollar sign on it.

The days here become more scheduled. The El Shaddai team (YFC), with whom we’ve become friends over the last few years, are here with us now. Two good words to describe them are "always laughing."

Andrew Trawick, our evangelist, will be training us in the mornings for the evangelism project, and in the afternoons we will be going to visit people at their homes. We will be showing the Jesus Film at night and inviting everyone we can. We’ll pause the Jesus Film at a point and Andrew will present the gospel. If this year is anything like the previous years, we will see a number of people receive Christ tonight and the following nights.

The main purpose for this email is to solicit prayer. A number of team members have been troubled by dreams, some clearly demonic. Sambo’s wife, Ruth, lost here baby yesterday at the hospital. We are all very sad for the two of them.

Ancestor worship and appeasing spirits with sacrifices are a daily reality for the people here. We have been praying, but we want to invite more people to pray. I’m including here a very detailed Google map of the location we are planting the church.

As we walk and pray and make invitations on these dirt streets, would you consider using Google Earth to walk and pray with us over the next few days? Could someone at Lookout Mountain contact our prayer team with this as well?

Below you can see our lodge in the middle of a community to the north and south of us. Our preaching point is on the main road north of our lodge next to the community water pump. To the east (right on the map) is the main road running north and south (to Maputo). Please, pray over these dirt roads, more people that you can imagine live here. Some in brick houses, many in grass huts.

Click the markers to get descriptions.

Here other map links, if the one’s above do not work for you:

Location of our Lodge
Location of Sambo’s House
Location of the school and community pump where we will show the Jesus Film and present the gospel

Today, Sunday, we split up as Josh, Rick, and Andrew preached in different churches.

These photos come from the Maputo market, the boy’s home, Umbeluzi, and lunch together.

Visit full gallery

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Basically it is Denver to Detroit to Amsterdam to Nairobi, Kenya to Maputo, Mozambique. I think its a long flight. We’ll see.

Thank you for praying.

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Kara heard a handful of opportunities there that might be a great fit for her and her passions.

Eunice and Elaine are also very positive about me shooting video for them. I can’t be more excited about the project. Only the high quality camera that I hoped to use on the trip has a broken audio component. This is a major problem as the old adage states: “Good audio can save bad video, but nothing can save bad audio.”

So I’ve just visited or called every camera repair shop in the city and no one can do it in the time frame or for a reasonable price. So I’m looking at buying a camera. Please pray for this. It would be a large financial step for Kara and I. There’s enough of my dad, the king of the gadget hounds, in me to be cautious about buying a new camera to quick. I’ve done my homework and I know what to get, but I’m not sure I know my soul.

How do you know if you desire to risk something in faith because God has placed it in your heart, or you just want to risk it because you want to do it really bad? Pure motives, how do you tell?

We can’t sit on this decision. Please pray for us to be smart.

I wonder if we were just being asked the question by God, “Are you willing to go anywhere?”

I hope we answered well.

Either way, we just had another meeting with the team going to Mozambique and the details are as firm as we can hope for.

I’m also getting very excited about shooting video in Kenya. We’re working up the framework for a series which will feature all the children of this orphanage. The end product, hopefully, will be 2 – 3 minute spot for each child that can be streamed from the ministries website and/or cut into a DVD to encourage sponsors or the discovery of sponsors for the children.

It’s so in my heart to capture these incredible stories, and tell them.

Tumaini is a children’s home as opposed to an orphanage, because the children that come there are not adopted out, but make Tumaini their home. Many of them have lost parents and had no other care giver, or where abandoned, which is a growing problem.

Most of you know that the orphaned children is reaching epidemic levels in Africa. They expect by 2010, only three years from now, 18,000,000 children in Africa will be without a caregiver. Because of things like AIDS and war, child headed households are common. (A child headed household is where an older sibling, often as young as 9 – 13, take on the care and provision for younger brothers and sisters.) The social fallout for this is difficult to wrap the mind around.

Tumaini is a great ministry which Community Uplift Ministries, a partnering community development non-profit which our friend Elaine works for, is hoping to replicate Tumaini in other countries, one being Mozambique.

We just got prices on tickets. Up until now, the extra travel we hope to do concerned us that the prices might be astronomical. As it turns out, the travel agent found tickets on Friday that make the cost of all the extra legs only a few hundred dollars more than a single trip to Mozambique.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get the agent’s message until he had left for the day. We’ve sent emails and hope to lock in those tickets.

My goal today is to summarize all the that we expect to be doing. So much has changed in the last few weeks, that until now we had nothing definite to communicate. As I get that trip report finished, I’ll post it to the site as well as mail it out to everyone.

Thanks for everyone asking how they can get involved in our trip to Africa this summer. We haven’t sent our letter yet because we are still battling to lock down plans. We know so far that we’ll be going to Kenya first to visit an orphanage called Tumaini outside Nairobi. Our good friend Elaine connected us to this ministry, as she has recently become the U.S. face for the ministry via Community Uplift Ministries where she works. (It’s a little confusing, so don’t fret if you missed all that.)

We’ll be looking into long-term ministry opportunities there, and I might be able to shoot some promotional video for the orphanage. (By the way, I need to post that video for the children’s ministry in Brazil we just finished. It still has a few touches left, but I’ll post it for everyone to see. I’ll do that after this note.)

Then we’ll travel down to Mozambique, as Kara renews some of the medical relationships she made on her last visit. We’ll connect with the Lookout Team at the end of their visit and help in some orphanages outside Maputo, Mozambique.

After this comes the question mark, appropriately illustrated by my father above. We’ve been invited to think about Thailand. Many of you might say what we said when the suggestion came up, “What do Thailand and the Wynns have in common?”

Well, we don’t know yet. One thrust and hope of this summer’s trip is to prayerfully gain a better vision for what God is calling us to do. It’s an odd place to be knowing from heart to bone that you are called to “go”, but to not posses the same clarity as to where.

Though I don’t actually believe it wise to pester God about the details of your future — not only does he not owe it to us, there are enough verses that indicate He doesn’t plan on telling us (Eccl 7:14, for example) – oddly enough, we have felt free to pray this exact thing. Of course, He can say “no”. Our clear conscience to pray for this doesn’t mean He’s going to answer the way we want Him to, but we feel like now is the time to pray in faith for clarity. For those walking with us as prayer partners, this is our biggest request of the summer.

Knowing to whom we should “go” will allow us to make a number of other choices we have on hold and will provide some real traction for these next two years, while we pay down student loans.

This all to say: More info coming soon. We have a meeting tomorrow that should determine our travel plans. Love to everyone.

Now obviously southern and central Africa is a big place. We have relationships in Rwanda, Kenya and Mozambique – terrific relationships, but no clarity yet where and with whom we might find a place to serve. In addition to these countries, we have a slight draw to country of South Africa, even though we have no relationships there. (P.S. If you are connected with compassion or media ministries in South Africa, let us know, because we are trying to make those relationships now before we go.)

Calling and desire are funny things. There is no doubt that we feel called by God and have a strong personal desire to go and minister in Africa, to use whatever we have to benefit whoever we end up living with over there. Of that fact, Kara and I are clear. Yet when it comes to where? We stop. We haven’t found a place that we both can say, “We should be there.”

Anyone who has known us for a while, knows we have wanted to go for years. God’s delay on our lives has allowed us to learn and grown in incredible ways here in the States.

I believe I entered a new level of humility (certainly not a finished journey in any sense) while working at Kinkos for almost a year after moving to Colorado. It was not an experience I think another person would have had in the same place, but my pride after graduating Dallas Seminary needed a season of cooling. Not that the job itself or the people I worked with had anything to do with it, but I had to face a disgusting and arrogant self-image. One that considered myself above or better than a 10 dollar an hour job. I feel ashamed of that attitude even now writing this. But I am so thankful now for that season now – as poorly as I went through it, due to endless whining and belly-aching to the Lord.

As for Kara, I can mention two great steps for her growth (of course, I prefer her to speak for herself, being that we are so beautifully different at almost every point, she would have unique perspective on her growth that only she could articulate). The first is nursing school and all that she is learning in the Emergency Department at Denver Health. Having known her now for almost seven years, I have seen her courageous journey into nursing. It is a journey of the heart. At seminary, she was one of the most applauded students, in my opinion. Professors regularly noted at the bottom of every day assignments, “Will you please consider us for your Ph.D.” Even of the two awards given to her upon graduation, one of them came from a department she didn’t even study in, but simply wrote her thesis for. (My major department, it should be noted) But because of her thesis, she was given that year’s departmental award. All her professors assumed she would go on to get a Hebrew or Greek degree. But it was the work at the Agape clinic, a free health care clinic down the street from the school, along with other opportunities from short-term mission trips, that tugged at her heart. She wanted to comfort and care for marginalized people, with no access to decent care. And even, in considering going to nursing school, she got constant challenges to become a doctor. It made no sense to people that someone as bright and capable as her would be a nurse instead of a doctor. But she saw that modern doctors didn’t spend the time with the patients anymore, they generally visited, diagnosed and moved on. Kara wanted to be the person who cared for the patient, who knew how they were doing, and could be very hands on. So after finishing her masters degree, she went back to college.

Once again excelling in her studies, she got on the advanced track at Denver Health student program, finished her nursing studies with honors, and has been working in the Emergency room for over a year now. Because of the downtown location, she sees gun shot wounds, stabbings, overdoses and rapes, almost daily. Recently, I found scratches on her right hand and when I asked her what they were from, she said, “Restraining an out of control crack addict.” Can you imagine little Kara, 125 soaking wet, chaining an overdosing drug addict to a hospital bed? I’m still trying to imagine it … or not imagine it.

Either way, I’m so proud of her. She is following her heart against the hollow whisperings of “external success.” By that I mean, it sounds more awe inspiring to say I’m a professor of Hebrew Semitics, or I’m a doctor of blah, blah, blah than to say I’m a nurse to homeless guys who wet the bed and I have to clean it up. Not to knock other careers which God has called people to, but to make the point that picking up a cross and following Jesus is always a downward journey, resisting paths that look like they will give you a better life and choosing the clear direction he has placed in your heart … i.e. the “workmanship, created in Christ for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”

Sorry, I can hardly talk about my girl without busting at the seams with pride. She will probably tell me to take all the above down, because it is not her way to draw attention or toot her own horn. But it’s my way, at least to tell stories I find amazing … and I know computers better than her, so if I don’t take this down, it’s not coming down.

The second step of grown for her has been at Lookout Mountain Church. He opportunities to sing on the choir and the band, to serve behind the scenes with the slides and develop real friendships. I have loved watching her enjoy and look forward to our small group, whom we love. You see, we both walked out of Dallas a little burnt on … I don’t know what you might call it … surface Christianity, commercial Christianity, plastic face faith … I don’t know. We know Jesus was real more than ever, and we had meet people who were honest and transformed to the core, but it felt like those people were so few and far between. Yet at LMCC (our church) we found a beautifully imperfect group of people attempting to deal with the mess of themselves and the church in a way that we could surrender ourselves to and join. So beyond Kara’s growth in music, a hearts passion for her, it has been exhilarating to see dig into the church.

Sorry, again. I’ve broken one of the few blogging rules. Be short. I’ll work on that next time.