RWANDA

"ZOE Ministries"

One of the really amazing perks of the work I do is that I sometimes get to travel to some amazing places I had never once thought I might visit to document what God is doing there. In Rwanda, I traveled with the ZOE Ministries team to visit children who had been empowered by the program to develop basic sanitation, learn life skills, and build their own small businesses, until they had the capabilities to support themselves - and eventually, others.

It's no small thing to be fed out of the fields of teenagers who had gone from begging in the streets to owning the largest banana plantation in the village, and it's no small joy to watch the pride on their faces when they show us that they now have enough to share.

I wrote a series of pieces on the mission and my experiences visiting Rwanda on the twenty-year anniversary of the genocide; you can read them here if you like (okay, okay, I know that sounds just awful, but it really is worth checking out).

INDIA

"Hope For Today Ministries"

I've now gotten to travel to Northern India twice with Hope For Today Ministries, the first time to follow our church’s pastors as we tried to decide how we could invest ourselves in this ministry, and the second a year later, when I joined our first mission team to travel to support it.

Creating house churches anywhere in India is difficult, but we met pastors who had been brutally beaten and had their family's lives threatened, but who continued on, despite having no support and earning a salary of about seventy-five cents a week.

I wrote a series of pieces both times I went to India, you can find them collected here.