Saturday, October 18, 2008

Lidia - about the Auditorium, a week later


"BEHOLD I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW""God does not dwell in buildings made by human hands but in blood washed people, filled with His Holy Spirit" (Erlo Stegen).



Last Saturday we simply couldn't stop our tears. Every time we think about what happened, we would look toward the Auditorium, and we could only weep. I wished so hard that
I would wake up and everything would be just a nightmare. Sunday, after uncle Erlo 's sermon, it was as if our tears were wiped away for good. I will tell you only the beginning of the sermon because I recorded it.

Sunday morning the Service was held in the School dinning hall. Only a few hundred people fit inside, the rest stayed outside, on each side of the building. We arranged chairs and sound outside. It was a very warm winter day – Ill send you a picture that I took right before people came for the Service.

Before sermon, uncle Friedel stood up and said, " Gods ways are perfect, even when we do not understand. The Lord gave and He has the right to take away . In all situations, we have to glorify His Name".
Then uncle Erlo held the Service. He started like this : We gathered in this place because our church burned down yesterday. People ask me what do I have to say about this. I am very refreshed. I can taste the sweetness of the Lord, I feel His peace and I am joyous. I feel that God's work continues. The Bible tells us we will go through various trials. And these trials have to make us stronger and cause our roots to go deeper, to grow and progress.
If an event like this would make me weak and depressed, then my faith is dead. A building burnt down. What is a building? The Gospel didn't burn . It goes on.

Paul went through a lot of sufferance. Our pain now doesn't even compare to his. In the history of Church we read how people themselves were incinerated, not just their churches. But the Gospel didn't stop but carried on full of power. Auditorium was built with human hands. But our bodies are the Temple of the Holy Spirit. If we would fall out, then that would be terrible indeed.
When my wife died, that was a bigger loss than the burning of the church, but that didn't stop me from preaching either. On the contrary, I experienced, that the Gospel carried on with even more strength. When they got my wife's dead body out of the house, we sang " We have the victory". The same song we can sing now for the Auditorium.

We must see this event as a new beginning, not an ending. The Gospel must go on and that is all that matters.

Then he preached about the Falling of the Holy Spirit ( Acts 2). It was the 4th time that he preached from the same passage and the Lord reveals to us more and more awesome things about His Holy Spirit. Last time he spoke to us about how a person filled with the Holy Spirit must look and act. This time he preached about "...when the day of Pentecost was fully come". The Lord set a time for everything. And uncle Erlo told us how to seek His will and not get ahead of His plans. How to have patience and not speed things up.

Now they are leveling the place where the auditorium was and they will install a tent and we will meet there Sundays for services. During the week the services will be in the dinning hall. In two weeks we will have the opening for the Youth Conference and we will have about 5 thousands kids for a week at the Mission.

We are getting ready to go in Botswana. We started praying and preparing for this since last year. The departure is tomorrow! We plan on staying for 3 weeks, but it takes 3 days only to get there. I'll tell you all about it when we get back.

So far, we have seen the hand of the Lord helping us and opening the doors for us. Money, visas, transportation and a lot of other necessary things (tents, isolation, etc).
Pray that the Lord goes with us. We live in dangerous times and maybe you heard how people here hate the foreigners.
I leave you all in His hand.

Lidia Veciunca
Kwasizabantu Mission, South Africa





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