Pray Space

My Pastor  ( who incidentally has an identical twin who is also a pastor, and an elder sister who is a minister are in the UK) lost his eldest brother on Saturday - really sad as this was my Pastor's son's birthday with a big celebration planned which they still held, but just sad the relatives who are in the UK came to both mourn and celebrate at the same time.

This brings the total of relatives lost in the last two months to four - a sister, a niece, an aunt have all passed away in the last few months, and his stepmother in the last year, I think.

It just seems an awful lot to go through - all the relatives who have passed away were in Zimbabwe which as you will know is going through a lot of turmoil. Life expectancy there is only 36 years. From what I can understand, there is very little medicine in the hospitals and we will all know how inflation must be affecting the country.

Not easy to pastor a church with so much grief to bear and the way the culture works, you just carry on.Supporting is sometimes hard because people do not let out their feelings in the same way as here. We will all go and pray as a church, but it is hard to describe how differently the support is needed.

Just feel like these guys need all the prayer they can get and if anyone wants to lift up a prayer for Zimbabwe as well......

We also have one of our ministers who needs complete healing from cancer.This is a man with a wife, and three kids who are not in this country. He is also a Pastor in South Africa but functions as a fellow Minister in our church. The family are kind of special to me.

Because of the ethnic groups in our church, deaths and illness in families are not that uncommon, It is not unusual for someone to need to go 'back home,' because a parent or close relative passed away, or is very sick,  but it is hard when it hits the Pastor.  Four close family in two months is pretty harsh....