Kavalu Comwe is a village in the Namibe Province where the Angola team has been able to most consistently do ministry. One of their main leaders, Isaac (pronounced ee-sahk) lives and farms there, and it’s located along a river, though for most of the past 16 years the river hasn't held any water due to drought. The people of Kavalu Comwe are of the Mucubal tribe (or the Kuvale tribe in the local language). They don’t have a written language, so unless they can speak and read Portuguese, the only way they can know the Word of God is by someone telling it to them. Hanimanga is one of the men the team met in this area who knows the Lord, and was eager to hear more about Him. He had a small New Testament in Portuguese, and though he is able to read it’s not quick or easy for him.
In their time in Angola, our friends met another missionary there who has had Mucubal people learn and record bible stories in their own languages on small recording devices. The team thought Hanimanga would be a great person to get one of these devices to so he could listen and learn and share these stories with the community when they aren’t there! After listening to the stories, when our team returned, Hanimanga had a question. In listening God telling Abraham to get up and go to a new place he had never been to, he asked, “does that mean I could also leave my home and go to another place to tell people about God?”
So, our first excursion when we got to Angola was to a village called Kuvale Dois, and Hanimanga came with us. In the days we spent camping there, people would come a sit with us to hear about God. We had so many amazing conversations, as it’s common in that culture not to just sit and listen, but to respond and ask questions and express agreement or disagreement. One day as we were sitting at our camp after lunch, a group of men stopped to talk with us about God as they were walking by. One of them told us (through multiple translations) that he wasn’t from that area, but that he was visiting and would be going back to his village many hours away the next day. He was so excited that he had found us there that day, and asked if we had a bible he could take with him. Since all of our Bible’s were in English, we knew they wouldn’t be any help to him! But Hanimanga, without hesitation, picked up the New Testament that he had kept perfect and clean and safe since 1994, and handed it to this man that he had never met. Isaac told us that he told the man that it was his as long as he promised that everyone in his village would hear the Word of God.
I find these testimonies so moving—that someone would have such pure, confident faith that the first time he hears that God tells us to go to places that aren’t our home to spread His Name, he would take it upon himself to do the same. That nothing, even giving away a bible treasured for more than 20 years, would be too great a sacrifice for someone to know God. This walked out faith is so powerful because it is so unlike the world around us. The world tells us we can’t go because “insert nine reasons here.” It tells us we can’t give things away because they’re too precious and they can’t be replaced, even by the God that created them and calls us His beloved. But our lives shouldn't look like the world. When we run into someone who doesn’t know God, do we have the same outlook on life that they have? Are our values identical? Do we share the same fears and anxieties? The Word of God calls us “a new creation,” “the righteousness of God,” “set free,” “holy.” We “are being transformed into the same image” of Jesus from one degree of glory to another, and Jesus himself says He is glorified in us. We’re told to give up our anxieties to God because he actually cares about you! (2 Corinthians 5:17, 2 Corinthians 5:21, Romans 8:1-2, 1 Peter 1:16, 2 Corinthians 3:18, John 17: 10, 1 Peter 5:7). We have everything we need to look nothing like the world, and to transform it in the name of Jesus. Our God isn’t someone we serve because it seems like a good thing to do, He’s someone we LOVE and who loves us! He changed us so completely so we can be His, so we can love him and know Him and have His heart for our own hearts. This is the gospel, not that when we die we go to the Good Place instead of the Bad Place, but that we’ve been made back into what we were meant to be all along—beings that have fellowship with the One who created us, and spared no expense to buy us back from darkness, and loves us.
