Over the course of this month we have done a lot of different things. Most of it manual labor (which is my favorite), lots of lugging water and building things and painting, etc., but over the past few days a few of the girls from my team and I were able to go visit a woman at the bottom of our big hill. They call her Agogo, which means grandmother. Apparently here you call all older women that (or men, it’s also the word for grandfather) as a sign of respect.
I didn’t know what to expect, these door to door type things can be awkward for me, but I was very pleasantly surprised. We walked down to her house and she was sitting out on the porch. We came and sat with her and talked and asked her questions about her life and her family. She had six children, all grown, but four have since passed away, one lives next door to her to help take care of her, and the last one lives in Lilongwe and doesn’t visit or take care of her at all. Her house doesn’t have any doors or windows, so she gets robbed very often.
She asked how old we all were, I told her I was twenty and she laughed that I didn’t already have children (a cultural difference that never gets old, I love how funny they think it is that I’m not married with kids yet). Everyone else on my team is older than I am so it got funnier as we went around. She then tried to tell us she was 24 years old, haha, silly Agogo. She’s close to 80 years old, she doesn’t know how old she is exactly but told us she was a little girl during World War II. And she is one of the loveliest ladies I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. She wears a covering over her hair, it looks like a small white blanket or towel. She has a green striped shirt with buttons down the middle that she wears tucked into her green chitange. Her skin is worn from the years but looks soft and delicate. Her limbs are frail but she was obviously very strong in her younger years. Being with her was like looking at your favorite book. You love every tattered page, every water mark, even in it’s current state it hasn’t lost its value and still deserves to be treated with love. I hope none of that sounded disrespectful, I have the utmost respect for that wonderful woman.
I think the most striking feature of Agogo has to be her eyes. They’re almost hidden in her face, if that makes sense, like you have to look for them. And when you find them you see the life in her, her deep brown eyes just searching to be seen. Everything about her seemed as though she felt forgotten. With me more so than the other girls, it seemed as though her default was straight back to my eyes. We had some sort of connection, it was like she was trying to ask me something with her eyes. If there was anything I wanted to leave her with or try to give her it was to feel seen. Not by me, but by the Lord. If there’s anything I can do or be, it’s to do my best a vessel for His love and His relentlessness for His children to find Him. Agogo is a Muslim lady. Even more sad than the fact that her children have passed, that her house doesn’t protect her, that the harvest will only feed her family for five months of the next year and then she will have no source of food or money to buy food, is the fact that she has known the Gospel to be an option most of her life and has chosen something else. Not the first time I’ve seen that I suppose, most people in America have at least heard the Name of Jesus Christ, but seeing it in this woman was different somehow. Thinking that she has lived nearly 80 years believing a lie. Not knowing true freedom and salvation in Christ. The idea that she might live the rest of her precious years still not knowing Him and then not seeing her in heaven, is simply heart breaking.
We prayed for her each day we visited. The first day she had told us she was feeling very sick and thought she had malaria. We prayed diligently for the Lord to heal her and that she would wake up without any pains so that she would know who the true Healer is and that she would come to know Jesus. I am very excited to say she hasn’t felt any of those pains since that first day, and I’m praying that it will be another foothold for the Lord to come in and lavish her heart. The next day she asked us to pray for her harvest, as I said before it will only feed her for about five months and they can’t sell any of it, so we also prayed that it would just be miraculous. That for every ear of maize they pull, another would show up in its place the next day. I want God to pour out His miracles on her so that she would know exactly who is responsible and exactly who the one true God is. That with every little miracle, with every display of love, with every new day she would see more and more of Jesus. I want to see her in eternity with us, I want her to share my absolute joy I have found in Him.
We are going to see her again tomorrow, the day before we leave, and it will be a sad goodbye. Before we left the first day, I felt God tugging at something in my heart. It was very abrupt but I felt strongly it was the Spirit leading me and I just tried to go with it, and I asked our translator if it was alright if I gave her something. He said it was and I slid off the ring on my right hand. You’ve probably seen the kind or seen mine even, it’s from Mardel’s (nothing valuable, monetarily at least) and it has Matthew 11:28 wrapping all the way around it. “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.” I had our translator explain what it said and what it meant and that I was praying that she would find true rest in the Lord. It was a beautiful little moment, one where I truly felt like God used me to show her how much He loves her, if only on a microscopic scale. If that was the only moment where I truly impacted the Kingdom this month,or even this entire year, it will have been worth it. Hopefully I can get a picture of her tomorrow to post at some point, so you can she what she looks like.
Please take the time today to make someone feel loved. Make someone feel remembered today. Make someone feel special. Agogo’s aren’t just in Malawi. There are more people than we can count in the states who have heard the Gospel yet choose not to believe it, help show them the truth through your actions.
