I found out that yesterday, my sweet friend Maswane, went home to be with the Lord!! It was such sad and sweet news – sad to find out that she is gone, but so happy that she is Whole now … no more pain, no more suffering! This morning as I was reflecting on my time with her – I was looking back through my journal and Bible and came across a scripture that God gave me for her on 8-11-09… exactly one month before she died.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 “Therefore do not lose heart. Even though your outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things that are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Here is the blog that Seth Barnes wrote about her:
I wrote about Maswane’s sad life in a blog last month. Today I received the news that she has died at 19 of AIDS. When she was five years old she was raped. That’s how she contracted HIV. She was raped again when she was seven and has never once consented to sex with a man. One of the men who raped her has died, and the other is free, he escaped to South Africa. Her virginity as well as her life has been brutally ripped away.
Maswane lived her last years in constant pain. Morgan Mckeown wrote this blog yesterday as a testament to it. She described her visit to Maswane’s bedside: “Soon after we entered she started whaling in agony, her piercing screams filled the hut. Seeing her writhe in pain and hearing her tortured scream was heart-wrenching. We all started to pray and she was visibly calmed, her body stopped shaking and slowly uncurled while her breath deepened again.”
Who can understand such pain? I don’t get it. I’ve tried to get my arms around it in these blogs, but my theology still falls short. And for some of you reading this, pain is an everyday reality – you know what I’m talking about. Words just seem so flimsy in the face of pain like yours.
I am so thankful for the friendship that I had with her and that God allowed me to spend her last weeks of life with her! She was a beautiful girl and a beautiful spirit and she will be missed dearly. Please keep her family in your prayers as I am sure it will be hard to adjust to life without her now. I look forward to sharing more pictures and videos of her with you!
