Walking down the Matador neighborhood in Guija, Mozambique, you are in another world where American paved roads and A/C doesn’t exist. The roads are craters of mud and water made from the Monsoon Thunderstorm that raged the day before. We are heading to visit the widowed, the injured, and the people in “The Program” (the ones with HIV). Left shoes litter the ground and mud huts built by our host and his team are the only refuge for these people from the African sun and storms.
We reach a home and see a “mama” on the ground inside. This elderly woman has lost use of her legs so she is just sitting in the home, and since we cannot go inside the home, we begin to wave and walk to the next house. But then Mama Adelina does something that I’ve only read about in the Bible.
Mama Adelina gets on her hands and begins to crawl out of her home. She knows that we are with the church. She knows we have come to pray to Jesus, and she knows that we can’t enter into her home because it’s rude so she knows her only option is to crawl out.
She doesn’t ask for help and she doesn’t look like she wants pity. She wants Jesus. She is desperate for Him because she knows it is only Him that can help her. And watching her scoot to her maiz-bag mat, I knew that our faith wasn’t enough.
In the Bible there is a woman who had that faith. We call her the Unclean Woman, but honestly, she is simply desperate for Jesus’ healing power. In her day, because she was bleeding, she shouldn’t have been in town. She should have been at home. And she shouldn’t have let people touch her, because she was unclean. But when she heard Jesus was in town, she was none of these things. She was desperate and went after Jesus, no matter what society said.
And that is the same as Mama Adelina. Women are strong in this community. They are the ones who tend the fields. They are the ones who hold the homes together. And when you can no longer take care of yourself, you are a burden to your family, if you have one. So for Mama Adelina to crawl her way out of her house was a move of complete desperation.
And we let her down. We didn’t let her down because our prayer didn’t make her walk. We let her down because our faith did not match hers. She came out completely relying and trusting on God, and we came to be nice and say a prayer for her. Our hearts were not in the same place.
We cannot live our faith in comfort. We cannot pray and expect no answer from God. We cannot live in a way that we can live without God. Because if we can live without God, then we will live without pursuing Him in desperation.
I did not come on the World Race to do good things and let people take pictures with me. I came to bring hope into the land of the hopeless. I came to cast out darkness with light. I came to wreck the devil’s schemes. I came to get to the end of my rope because that is when complete reliance on God occurs. If I am to live a Jesus-centered life, then I need to come to Jesus the same way Mama Adelina came to us: on my knees and completely desperate for God to move.
