Women. Daughter of the King. Bride of Christ. You are loved and are so valuable to those around you and even more from our Lord. Our God is a faithful, generous, merciful, and loving God. He works in mysterious and incredible ways across the world and in this little village of Nygatare. This blog post will be a brief summary of what occurred during one of our Wednesday intercession meetings.
At this point on the race I find it difficult to figure out my favorite days of the race, because in truth there are some incredible moments that happen. One of those awesome Spirit filled days happened during our Wednesdays intercession visits with women from the church. For this intercession, our team had to prepare a brief message that would be an encouragement for the body of Christ and allow the Lord to move during those conversations. This time around I decided to share an encouraging message through a story that related directly to African women on the dowry. It was a story of a father that never loved his daughter and saw her as being less valuable because of her appearance. Through the story a king comes to visit this father to choose a bride of the 9 daughters he has. In the end, after a lot of discussion and hurtful exchanges the king offers to take this girl whom is the least liked of all her siblings and is offered 100 cows to be married with her. As I read this story many of the women around me began tearing up. They had also experienced very similar hardships and hatred in their lives. They had known what it was like to be ignored by their father to waiting on God. The stories ranged from living in a hut selling alcohol to provide food for their children to being left for a younger woman and not having a mattress to sleep in after everything had been taken away. They felt betrayal from their spouses to complete sorrow from the loss of 5 children. As our discussion progressed I began to share a message of the king in the story not seeing the girl he was interested in marrying for what she looked like on the outside but in who she was. That is the very same thing that occurs when we come to Jesus. He doesn’t look at our sin and baggage but see’s our heart and brokenness. He loves us for who we are and not what we can bring to Him. After much discussion and prayer, we left with our hearts full of encouragement in knowing that our God is literally able to do anything. My teammates and I ended this incredible day in full worship underneath the stars. Thousands of stars illuminating the dark night and reminding each one of us, the amazing and majestic God we serve.
The women pictured below are women that are empowered, fierce, passionate, and devoted Christians. They make a point to meet every week and lift their physical and spiritual needs to the One that can change it all. They have experienced life situations that few of us can say we will ever experience however, the unchanging truth through it all is that our God is the same Redeeming God. He has moved in the lives of these women and brought them out of the place of despair and poverty by his redeeming power and love!
