Have you ever wanted to make an impact in the world, or in someone’s life?
In 2007 my wife and I travelled with 6 friends to a little village in the middle of Malawi called Ngodzi. We spent 14 days in this village building a house. Each of us had paid around $4500 to cover the cost of our flights, our accommodation, and the construction materials for the house. We did this because we wanted to make an impact in the fight against HIV/AIDS. You may be wondering – what does building a house have to do with HIV/AIDS?
Not long after we finished the house, a family moved in to their brand new home. The kids went off to the nearby school while their mom and dad walked the short distance to a medical clinic called Lifeline. The man and woman worked for Lifeline, one as a nurse and the other as an administrator. Ngodzi is in the middle of nowhere, 2 hours from the capital and an hour from the closest city, yet this little village had the highest infection rate of HIV/AIDS in the country, higher than the national average which was 28%. The only way to get medical workers to work in the Lifeline clinic in Ngodzi was to build houses for their families, so that’s what we did.
Three years later I met with the founder of that clinic and he gave me an update. Over the years that the clinic had been in operation in Ngodzi, the infection rate in the region had dropped below the national average to 14%. That clinic, that couple, that house, and those six friends had had an impact. Lives were changed. All we did was carry and stack bricks for 14 days, but those simple actions had a meaningful impact on an entire village and community.
Do your actions each day lead to meaningful impact? Is it possible to live in such a way that little actions like carrying a brick can impact lives and our world?
This weekend Pastor Colin will be talking about how the Jesus way of living is about doing little things every day that lead to meaningful impact. I hope you’ll join us this Sunday as we discover that the Jesus way of living is about having a meaningful impact in the lives of the people and world around us.
See you soon,
Pastor Kirk
