Hilda…you have touched my heart. Holy Spirit, prompt me to pray for her and remember her on our birthday!! Oh God, don’t let this experience be forgotten, let it be a constant reminder of your grace, the amazing ways you work and the way you can use broken, screwed up people like us to bring your kingdom here and now!
One of the very first days we went up to a little village called Lomo de Corvina I was in a group with a few gringos and a few people from the church and we were doing door-to-door evangelism. It’s such a hard thing for me to believe in sometimes, I feel like people are just praying a prayer to get us out of their homes. So we knocked on a faded blue door where a regular, plain Peruvian woman in her mid thirties answered. The gringos and church people were on slightly different pages, we wanted to listen to what she had to say, they wanted to preach to her and get her to receive the gospel, both good things. So she accepted Christ, we prayed for her husband with stomach problems in the hospital, and for her 10-year-old son whom she scraped money together for him to go to school. Then we said goodbye to Hilda. I picked up a bible for her (the only place to buy a bible is in downtown Lima, an hour bus ride!!) and a few days later we gave it to her and she said that she found it difficult to read, with her grade 2 education, so we said we would come and read with her.
Over the next 3½ weeks we tried many times to talk with her, and either she was away from home or was busy. Finally a few days before we were leaving I tried again to chat with her. And what she said broke my heart, seriously. Hilda’s husband had left her 3 weeks earlier…because she was pregnant. The bastard got better in the hospital, found out his wife was having another child and just ran away. What the hell is wrong with us men in general, not just here but everywhere? OK that’s maybe a discussion for another time… So Hilda was excited about the child, which was great, people had told her to have an abortion but she refused. She told us of a miscarriage she had 2 years ago, told us that the same husband had left her then too, he sounds like a real winner. She said she was in the hospital on her birthday (Sept. 8, that’s mine too!!) and no one came to visit her, all these painful events and words all without a tear.
She said that the Lord is good and that it will all work out, what faith she has! While I was just hugging her and thinking the worst, thinking there was no way anything good could ever come of this, and she says God’s in control!! This is a brand new believer!! She had been reading her bible with her son in the evenings and asking him to explain things to her but she wanted verses she could read cause she didn’t know where to even start so I gave her some. She then started talking about the future, this is when the tears came, she didn’t have steady work, she didn’t even know if she had enough food for the next week, and then when the baby would come, she said there would be hardly any way for her to survive. My heart broke for Hilda. She was hard working, she said she
didn’t like hand outs from the Catholic church that she was occasionally attending. And as we left that day after words of encouragement and prayer, Meghan (a wonderful girl on the media team who speaks fluent Spanish) and I said we have to get her some groceries.
A few days later I had time to go to a Super Market and also the local fruit and veggie market. We spent a little more than what I make in an hour at home and she had food for a week for her and her son, and this was good stuff, not just rice and potatoes. I dropped it off and her son was only there, not her. But we came back the next day and talked with her, she said that her son told her that Gringos form God had come and brought mountains of food. She had also found steady work where she made $10 a week which would be enough for food and bills. But this was our last day up at Lomo de Corvina and we decided to tell her that we wouldn’t be coming back; her face immediately changed. She was crying and couldn’t believe that her new friends were leaving. She said that she was so lonely and ever since we came she had friends (like I said there was a 3 week gap where we didn’t even speak with her at length) So we brought a lady from the church who has a woman’s cell group up there every week and she really connected with Hilda.
This is what short-term missions is about. It’s about raising up new believers and connecting them with strong Christians already in that place and then backing away. (There’s a little more to it than that but this blog is getting a little long!)
Hilda will name her baby Jonathan if it’s a boy!! And everytime she has a birthday she will put two candles in it to remember me. It is only God who can use a few words of encouragement, a little bit of groceries and lots of prayer to change a life like Hilda’s has been changed.
Father, be with Hilda now, speak to her and protect her in these baby stages of salvation that she is exploring. I pray in the name of Jesus that she would trust in you, you will provide all of her needs, let her know how much you love her and send people into her life to lift her up and teach her of your glory and the life that you have for each and every one of your children.
