Give us Grace, Not “Normal”

Her eyes lock mine. Her wrinkled face is contorted, and her statement comes out as a question; “God will help us…?” I glance down at her daughter suffering on the hospital bed, recovering from an operation, and then back at the face so close to mine. The eyes begging an answer. I say the one word, the yes. Anna she sings, and I play my flute. We try to bring the melody of grace to this one girl in a bustling hospital full of hurting people. It is His faithfulness and mercy to the girl who wears fresh wounds deep in her stomach. She will scar and there will be no more smoothness, just a memory of the suffering. The floor is cracked, the walls are dirty, people are shuffling past and a baby is wailing but we pray that now, like never before, she will know His presence. Because sometimes pain drives us into His presence, into His peace.

—-

Half an hour later, we are sitting at another young lady’s home, enjoying the cool shade under the thatched roof of their sitting-place. Little girls play with piles of pebbles, and a chicken wanders through puddles of sunshine dancing on the dirt floor.

As the talk continues, we get into deeper subjects. I hear the story of the little girl sitting on my friends lap. How she was brought when a tiny baby, dropped off by her mother who left and hasn’t come back. How she had an operation and my friend stayed with her at the hospital for all those days. How she drank juice and sugary tea and water, and now was just beginning to eat. How she saw my friend as her mother. The story keeps coming, but it’s so similar to the ones I’ve already heard so many times from girls my age. So many have little girls or little boys who they “mother” in whatever way they think best. The little ones are almost entirely spoiled with instant gratification of their every wish. I think of the article I read this week about how the lack of a father affects children and I swish my water in the tin cup and pray in my heart for the children of Congo.

I ask if it doesn’t break the mother’s heart to come back and find her baby attached to someone else? Doesn’t it hurt a mother to be constantly working and return in the evening to find her children distanced from her, to find that she cannot talk to her daughters anymore?

Oh, but it’s normal, they tell me. Parents mostly want to get their children to university and get them married/settled down somewhere, they tell me. Parents know that university will ruin their children, and many don’t check out the integrity of their child’s spouse as long as there is enough money in the marriage to make them feel important.

They say it like this hard fact. So many parents figure their kids are ruined anyways by that age that they don’t even try to salvage them. Maybe the parents themselves don’t have anything else to offer their kids, I think. 

After all, it is normal.

“How can you ask if someone regrets that they only eat with their mouth, and not with their eyes or nose?” they ask me, “They don’t even know that another way exists.”

I close my eyes to stop the pounding in my head. I see the face of that girl in the hospital. So that’s where she’ll end up? I open my eyes and see the happy little girl still playing with her pebbles and it makes me sick to think of her future. I see the toddler cuddled in my friend’s lap and think of where her mother is….where her father is….I think of how girls from nine and up are put in charge of rearing babies and toddlers – they do not know how to raise them. Oh, the children of Congo!

In the evening friends come to see me, and they speak of all the same issues. One says that when she’s a mother, if she doesn’t want all her children, she’ll just ‘give some away’. Speaks of how she’s trained her younger siblings to love and obey her instead of their mother.

Pray for this new generation, that there would be a new mentality, that they would have new hearts….

Grace has begun, we see healing in families. There are always exceptions to normal. But there is still so far to go….

Pray for the parents of Congo.

Path of Purity

June 30, 2011 I wrote this in one of my posts;

The sowing was hard, but we had a faint taste of the joy that will come in the harvest yesterday. I can’t wait for it – can’t wait for the harvest. Can’t wait to find out what fruits all those little seeds bore. Can’t wait to see how God was working it all for the good. Can’t wait to see how the tears we shed in the planting were used to water and soften the hard soil. Can’t wait for the joy that will be on that day….. so much joy!!

I was writing about the leader’s training we had done.

Now, all these months later, we had another taste of the joy.

Under the evening Congo sky, seated on wobbly chairs, surrounded by old and young Congolese, we listened as Grace committed herself to purity before God, before her parents, and before her future husband; purity of mind, of heart, and of body so that she can enter marriage with a clear conscience. We listened as she told us that she would not be doing this by her strength, but by God’s.

The tears, the dead-ends, the worries and wonderings during our friendship, they were all worth it. To see her face radiate joy, her finger flash silver of promise, her lips stammer the desire for holiness, her eyes shine hope – it was all joy!

Yes, she has made mistakes, yes, she is not perfect, yes, she has difficulties ahead.

But she has placed her hand in His, she has chosen the high road, she has lifted her head and planted her feet on the promises, and she is looking more like a daughter of the Most High than ever before!

This is Grace's father. I am so, so thankful that he is doing this with his daughter and that he is the one who put it on her finger and who also put his name to her resolution... pray that their father-daughter relationship continues to deepen!

Grace’s testimony is already challenging other youth, but pray that she stands strong and falls more in love with Jesus every day.

we all prayed for her - and now we ask you all to join us....

Darkness

It was a hot afternoon the day Joanna and I biked up to Gamba to visit Henriette (one of the girls who did the leader’s training). So, so hot. There was hardly a breeze to lift the limp mango leaves and yet the merciless sun continued to scorch everything in its reach. We found Henriette standing in the shade, and she pulled out stools for us. There was so much news to catch up on, and our happy voices rang through the still afternoon air. Henriette had been at a village with her sick grandmother. “So, how did you like your visit?” I asked.

“I do NOT like the village,” she replied emphatically. “There are too many witchdoctors there.”

“They’re here too, you know.” I remarked, dozens of stories I had heard, some frightening, some funny, rushing to mind.

“Yes, but here at least they don’t know me.” A few men trudged out of the forest and down the path we sat by, feet moving rhythmically as they balanced large sacks of charcoal on their heads.

“Do witchdoctors have music?” I asked, though I could guess at the answer. To reply, she told me a long story that her grandmother had told her.

One night when her grandmother was a little girl, she heard the sound of music coming from the forest. She asked her father where it was coming from, and he told her that witchdoctors were making the music. Neither the girl nor her brothers believed their father, and they kept insisting that they wanted to go see who was playing the music and join in the dance. The father finally gave in, and they began to walk. They walked for a loooong way and finally came upon the music-makers. All they could see was a ring of fires coming out of the witchdoctors’ mouths. The children began to be afraid and asked their father to bring them back. But he told them that since they wanted to see who was dancing, they would. They entered the circle, and all the lights went out. The leader of the witchdoctors came forward and asked why they had come. The father replied that the children had wanted to see who was making the music. Instantly all the fires were lit again and it was very light. The children could see clearly these people, and ran in terror all the way home.

I wondered how much of that story was true, then decided that the real question was how much was false. As Henriette talked about how the witchdoctors could fly on benches, I thought of the stories of witches on brooms and wondered how two cultures so separated could have the same stories…unless, of course, they aren’t stories. Now that she had gotten started, Henriette wasn’t going to stop. Somehow, it was easy to talk of darkness when the sun was blazing in all its glorious might and there were friends around. She talked of a man eating his wife and confessing to it when drunk. I was shocked at this, so she explained that he had helped eat his friends’ wives and if he didn’t offer his they would eat him. Whoever they name, you must give up. There is no choice. I shuddered at the evil of this hopeless tangle of darkness. Of people trying to find power and ending up enslaved to something greater and worse than they could ever know. Of others living in constant terror, not knowing who is sold to the demons and who is not. But my thoughts kept coming back to the question I ask every time someone starts talking of these things (which is often enough). The question I ask because I love the answer.

“Can they do anything to a Christian?”

“Oh no!! They are powerless against the Christians. That is, the true believers, not the ones only paying lip-service to the church. If the witchdoctors come near the house of a Christian, it appears to them as if it is full of fire, and they cannot enter.”

Praise be to Jesus who delivered us from death and the fear of death! How these people need to be introduced to the God who is more powerful than Satan. Pray for spiritual protection around all the girls involved in Bana Basi ya Kopela – Satan is real in this world, and his presence is felt strongly here.

Pictures!

When I started this blog, I promised my younger sister that I would use a lot of pictures (that being the blog she enjoys reading most). As I look over the posts this last month, however, I don’t find many pictures. So this post is for giving you more little snaps of these beautiful, laughing people. Keep Congo in your prayers!!

It may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me, but it is a wonderful thing that God thinks I’m worth dying for.

- Lewis Smedes

one of our friends

Resolution One: I will live for God. Resolution Two: If no one else does, I still will.

-Jonathan Edwards

My soul, admire the boundless love of God to thee and others of the human race.
Worms are bought with the blood of the Son of the Highest! Dust and ashes
redeemed with a price far above silver and gold!

-Charles Spurgeon

another little friend who has left town to go to family - we miss her happy chatter so much!

Immediate fruit may come, for God worketh marvellously, but whether it does or not,
your plain duty is to sow. Reap you shall, but meanwhile you must be satisfied to go
on sowing, sowing, sowing, even to the end. Reaping is your reward, but sowing is
your work.

- Charles Spurgeon

the road

The way to Heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural bias of our flesh.

-Jonathan Edwards

Forgiveness

Her face is scarred, the lines of time and pain running deep. Her hands are withered, projecting veins colliding with tough callouses from years of manual labour. As we read together the old, wise sayings of Solomon in the Proverbs, she repeatedly nods her greying head, murmuring, “yes, yes. It is like that.” Eventually we come to the topic of forgiveness. I ask her if she has people she hasn’t forgiven. The old eyes fill with memories of years gone by, and she answers with a string of stories pulled from the painful past.

I had a young child, but a man killed it. Killed my baby. My family demanded revenge – they wanted that man to die. But I refused. I said that they would have to kill him once I’m dead, for I wasn’t going to be responsible for his death. I still greet his children and grandchildren, and I even talked to him again. Is that not forgiveness? 

Once a young man on a motorbike knocked me over on the road. My leg has never healed – that is the limp I walk with. The neighbours insisted that I make him pay a lot, but I refused. He comes to help me in my garden, but I hold no grudge. Is that not forgiveness?

The stories continued, but that one phrase kept ringing in my head…is that not forgiveness?…Could I ever forgive a wrong like that? Do I truly know what forgiveness is?

How rich God’s forgiveness to look on our sins – even more foul in His holy eyes than those the old lady had to forgive – and to freely erase them. To forgive them, to forget them, to heal and restore instead of condemn and judge. To love instead of destroy, to be broken and pained so that we can become whole and free. What a God. What forgiveness!

Little Angel

Almost one year ago, on July 20, 2010, I wrote in my journal:

Angel is the sweetest little 10-year-old. She is very pretty and I loved her right away. From the little I’ve seen, she has strong bonds with her little brother Jacob. The pair came on her first coming – I think Angel was too shy to come on her own – and it was the cutest thing to see their tender goodbye and Jacob’s protective air. He looked as proud of his sister as she looked of him, and it is what made me love the two of them. Angel lives in the valley with the old, old lady….Today, we asked when it was hardest to rejoice. Angel gravely said “Death”. The other girls laughed, thinking (I guess) that she meant when she had died she wouldn’t rejoice. A big girl hushed them…”she was there when her mother died.”….I cringed at those words coming from a 10-year-old. God must have wept. He loves you, Angel!

Today, over a year from when that sweet girl walked into my life, she is walking out again. Angel is leaving with her two younger brothers to go to the capital city of Congo where her father is. She came today to say good-bye, and I got the impression that she was fighting hard to hold back tears. She hasn’t seen her father for a long, long time. He has a wife – not her mother – who has a child of her own. I longed to somehow protect Angel, to allow her to grow up in a strong Christian family, to see her become a woman of God. As we prayed for her and Jacob today, we begged God to keep their young minds guarded. As we shook hands for the last time, Angel’s small warm fingers lingered in mine, and I pressed them tight, saying, “Angel, don’t you ever forget that God’s your Father. He’s always there for you.” My heart was full with so much that had to be said, had to be pressed into her heart, but she nodded, pulled her fingers away, bravely attempted a smile, and left. Pray for this precious child of God’s. Pray He would protect her and that she will grow to be a gentle woman of God.

 

she's the one in the front