Dave & Amy Terpstra

I think that enterprise can be a very good thing. I believe that even for those of us who do faith-based work, business can be a vehicle for changing the world.

Here in Mozambique I have already seen the effects of enterprise on the women we work with through Free The Girls. It is amazing to see the transformation of the women that is caused by their participation in a business in just a short period of time.

One of my favorite stories is of “F”. When she first started working for us, she was constantly trying to find out what she could get for free. Now, after several months of selling bras she employs a couple of other women to help her sell. She started off wanting a handout, she moved to being a sole-proprietor selling bras, and now has employees! She’s a small business owner. Enterprise has changed her whole life.

But I see enterprise working in other areas as well. Amy and I don’t just work with survivors of trafficking. We also work with a team that helps street boys return to their homes. To date, they have helped over 50 boys leave the streets of Maputo and reintegrate with their community. They follow up with each of the boys to make sure they are in school and that their family continues to provide for them.

Together with this team I have started Armadura Gym. This neighborhood gym helps to fund the project to street boys. What’s especially great is watching Mozambican dollars pay for Mozambican ministry. It’s beautiful.

And of course, I have more projects in the works as I write, but they aren’t ready to go public just yet. In my short time here in Mozambique I have been convinced more and more that God is using business alongside of missions to transform lives. I’m excited to keep dreaming up new ways to find partnerships between the two. Let me know if you might want to partner with me on any of these projects.

I don’t do resolutions anymore. OK – I suppose I think about things I am going to work on next year that I didn’t focus on this last year, but it doesn’t feel quite like a resolution.

I’ve changed from resolutions to an annual check-up. I go and see a doctor once a year to talk about how my body is doing. So a couple of years ago I decided to do the same thing with God. Since I am bit of a checklist kind of guy, I searched the scriptures for various lists that I could use as a self-assessment. Then I created a document to help me honestly assess where I am at.

I check red if it needs immediate attention, yellow if I need to work on it more, and green if things seem to be okay. Here’s what I came up with. Let me know what you think. Also, if you can think of some other lists from the Bible that might help me with my annual checkup, please pass them along.

(please note – the lists are doubled because they were used as a handout in a church bulletin.)

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1rjBLys-6tjFYZOkE_tXe912TMWnc4foyfGNhJdaBFJpHj5hwDs_T3Vqm28Is/edit?usp=sharing

My world was rocked this last week. Amy and I have been adding a new component to our language study. We have been recording conversations between two of our Xangana-speaking friends, and then playing the conversation back to translate it.

It is challenging. But in the middle of one of our recent conversations I heard something that sent me reeling. I asked our two language helpers to talk about their churches. They each attend different churches and I wanted to work a little bit on church vocabulary.

So as I was listening to them talk about church I couldn’t understand what I heard:

Ho yini kareke ka wena (How is your church?)

Kareke ka mina ki kongela kwatsi (My church prays well)

Wait a minute. Did you catch that?!? He was asked: How is your church. Did you see how he responded?

He didn’t say how many people they baptized this year. He didn’t mention how fabulous the preacher is or how many people showed up to Sunday School. He didn’t even just say “fine”.

He said their church prays well. That’s how he measures the status of their church.

I’m not sure whether or not that is the only way or the best way to measure success in a church, but I know I’ve never heard a single pastor ever explain how their church was doing based on the fact that their church prays well. I know I never used that expression in my tenure at TNL.

So I’ve been thinking about how we measure success in the church. And I’ve been thinking about how we measure success in other areas of life. Are we measuring the wrong things? Are we just measuring the things that are easiest to measure?

So I’ve created a to-do list for myself before the new year. I am going to think of 5 things that are important to me that I do not currently measure (or measure well), and I am going to find a creative new way to measure them. Any ideas?

So we had a bit of parenting flop a couple of days ago. Amy has been especially busy at the kids’ school with PTA responsibilities and I have been busy at the gym trying to help get it ready to open.

To give you a picture of just how busy we are, take last weekend as an example. On Saturday I ran a marathon in South Africa while Amy organized the food fair at the kids school. The next day there were 200 people at our house for a wedding and I spent time with a team of South Africans who were in town on a short-term trip to work on the gym. Marathon – Food Fair – Short-Term Team – Wedding. We are really busy.

Well on Thursday night this week Jake and Alyson had a play at school. It was a circus. Literally. Alyson was a snake dancer who did a great job hula hooping to a well-choreographed dance routine. Jake was a magician who successfully pulled a spider and a scarf out of a hat. (I still don’t know how he did it because he explained to me that magicians aren’t supposed to reveal their secrets.)

So after the show Amy headed back out to the refreshment table to sell snacks and I piled the kids into the car to go home. At home, I successfully got them into pajamas and into bed. Then the next morning when I logged in to the computer I saw a picture Amy posted on Facebook that Alyson had lost her tooth. I thought it was crazy that she lost her tooth just before she left for school and I missed it.

But she didn’t. She lost it at school the day before and we didn’t notice. Amy and I each had multiple conversations with our daughter who lost one of her TOP, FRONT teeth and we didn’t notice.

How can you miss something like that? I mean, it’s a front tooth. And yet, we didn’t see it until the next morning.

I wonder what else I have been missing recently. I imagine there is quite of bit of stuff on the list of things I have missed in the last couple of weeks.

So I spent some time confessing my sin of busyness to God. It’s ridiculous to allow myself to get too busy. I felt like a failure as a parent.

After my confession (which God graciously accepted as always), God reminded me that Mary and Joseph once left Jesus by himself in Jerusalem while they headed home to Nazareth. He was left by himself for a couple of days! And yet God still chose them as the parents of the Messiah.

I think that was God’s way of reminding me that as parents, we get a lot of slack. Apparently even kids with parents who are sometimes busy, frazzled, and forgetful can still turn out okay.

There is a mosque not far away from where we live. In fact, the name of the road that begins across the street from our house translates to “Mosque Road”. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had basically forgotten that there was a mosque in the neighborhood. Then they installed a new speaker system. Now we get to hear the call to prayer 5 times a day.

I love it. Of course, I don’t understand a word that is said/sung. And the call to prayer represents a call to system of religion that I believe to be misguided and dark and deceptive. However, I have personally enjoyed the reminders to spend time in prayer.

When Muslims pray, they say the words “God is Great!” and then they recite portions of the Qur’an. They first stand. Then they kneel. Then they prostrate themselves.

Although I don’t change position from where I am at the moment, I have been praying when the speakers call me to. I am following our Lord’s instructions when he taught his disciples to pray. He said,

“This, then, is how you should pray: