By Pastor Kobus Grobler, CEO
There is a kind of hardship that does not make the news. It lives in the quiet of a home where the money ran out before the month did. It sits in the chest of a pastor who preaches hope on Sunday but lies awake on Monday wondering if his church will survive.
Across the fifteen countries where EMIT works, this is the landscape many of our leaders navigate every single day.
They are men and women who have chosen, often at great personal cost, to stay. To stay in the community. To stay in the pulpit. To stay present to people who have been told, in a hundred different ways, that they do not matter.
What keeps them standing?
Not the absence of suffering. Not a theology that promises easy answers. What keeps them is something far more durable, a hope that does not depend on circumstances to remain true.
Paul wrote those words from a prison cell, not from a season of comfort, but from chains, and still he said: “I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content” (Philippians 4:11). That word learned matters. Contentment in hardship is not a gift that arrives fully formed. It is forged.
A pastor in Zambia who lost his income during the economic crisis did not close his church, he opened it wider, turning it into a feeding point for his neighbors. A woman leader in the DRC kept training others through regional instability because, as she said quietly, “If I stop, they stop. And they cannot stop.”
This is not optimism. Optimism depends on things improving. This is hope which holds even when they do not.
The theme of this quarter’s newsletter, Faith, Hope and Love, is not an abstract trio of virtues. It is a description of how our leaders actually live. Faith that God is present even in the compound of a Nyaope addict. Hope that a young man on a street corner has a future. Love that cooks a meal on a Tuesday when there are easier things to do.
Paul closes 1 Corinthians 13 simply: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Greatest, because love is the one that acts.
Your partnership sustains that love. You are not funding a program. You are keeping a light burning that refuses to go out.
Thank you for staying with us.
Kobus Grobler – EMIT CEO
This article first appeared in the EMIT Newsletter, Second Quarter 2026.
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