Since our time in Alabanza in South Africa, I have been praying for God to be intimate, to show that He is intimate, to show that He cares about the inconsequential details as well and the life or death details or life. And He is that kind of intimate to each of us. He is so close all the time that most t
imes we don’t even recognize Him in our lives. Its a lot like when you’ve lived somewhere for a long time and you get used to seeing the same houses, taking the same roads, seeing the same people, smelling the same smells, etc. But our God is a God that knows how open our eyes again.
My team has been ministering with Team SALT and Team LEGO in Swaziland for the past 2 weeks or so. And our very first morning there, we got dropped off in front of a small concrete building witha sign that read: ” Mbutu Metropolitan Church. (And metropolitan is defintely not the way that I would have described the church.) This very church ended up being a place that God wanted to use our team. We ended up ministering through this church in a variety of ways, through church services, through impromtu visits to area families, and through a bible study.
One afternoon, Emilie, Brady, and I went out with Smah, one of the young pastors at the church to visit some homes. As we walked along the dirt road to different homes and as we visited with different families, I couldn’t help but sense the despair and hopelessness in this area. At each home we went to, we offered prayer. And people asked for prayer for happiness, for people in their family to stop dying, for healing for family members dying of AIDS, for children that had run away, for their babies to stop being sick, for children that were psychotic, the list continues. And it dawned on me that God knew their hurt and need, and went to some crazy lengths to show that He heard their cries, the things that they in most cases weren’t even able to verbalize. Here we were 3 women in the middle of the bush in Swaziland, in a place that has hardly seen foreign missionaries, showing them that God sees them and knows them and loves them and wants to fix the junk in their lives. This is our God and there in no one like Him!!
