Aunty Raper

Here I go again! Since I was 12 and old aunty Raper came to our house in 65 Gardiner Street, Brakpan, I have literally lived to fulfill a one line prophecy: 'Young man, you have a calling from God and God will also use you in other lands!'
I looked at Apostle Paul's travels and then drew a world map and traced my travels over the years...it turned out to be a work of modern art! There were too many lines coming and going to other lands! I think Paul would have loved to own a jet of his own! Imagine what he would have done - then again he needed the secluded time in prison to write all the epistles. I wonder if he ever thought that his letters would outlive him by 2000 years?
Luke wrote a thesis to Theophilus to convince him of the reality of Jesus Christ and the work of the Apostles. He never thought it would be part of a bible.
Well, someone said, we are all writing a bible, a chapter every day - say, what is the bible according to you? André's Gospel is just like the bible, I suppose: there are good thing and things I would like to forget as well! It is hard to understand how God can forgive and forget. We struggle to forgive ourselves, let alone other people!
Luckily God sent His Son Jesus Christ to come and feel what it was like to be a human being - with all our faults and inbuilt failure systems! Yet, being human is no longer an excuse for making terrible mistakes and being defeated, because Jesus offers his life when we are willing to deny our old lives and to put our faith in Him.
Faith is a strange thing...the moment you are too much aware of your effort to believe it dissipates the substance of faith! It is in self-forgetfulness that we achieve most things. A mother lifts a car at the scene of an accident to get her little child out from underneath the wreck! Ask her to do that at any other time and she won't be able to do it!
So, when I made my life's travel map, I suddenly became too aware of my effort to fulfill an old prophecy and didn't want to trace my steps any more. When I try to be perfect I make such terrible mistakes that I have to hang my head and confess I need some help!
The bubble of the rest of faith is something that brings success, godly success, without much effort. There is no self-talk involved. When we do everything whole heartedly as unto the Lord, we can do amazing things.
God is able to do all things. He gives us ability to do things. When we use our god-given abilities to do things, He is glorified in us. We glorify the one who created us by doing what he enabled us to do!
My dad was a pilot in the Air Force during WWII. Perhaps I have inherited some of his genes for I simply love to fly. So here I go again - off to Scotland this time, then on to Portugal and then back to London and back home again.
If I try to calculate all the costs involved in all my travels it boggles my mind...how on earth was I able to do it for a life time, never knowing where the money for the next ticket will spring from? Let me not think on't...
Something I love doing, that I have been doing for most of my life, that I am committed to do for the rest of my life as long as I am spared and kept healthy is to go to other lands to spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God and to help people to be free...to be themselves...as God made them! No longer slaves of systems and manipulation of others!
I prayed in John Knox's prayer room up in his house in Edinburgh the first time I went to Scotland. There is nothing in the room. Just a cement floor. Well, prayer needs no furniture or outward stimulation, it is an inward journey. So before I go to other lands, I go within, and pray and see in the spirit the land I am going to...I view the Promised Land and then go out to conquer...in the Name of the one who sent me with a simply prophecy from an old lady when I was 12. Who would have believed a little boy from Brakpan would have travelled the globe?