(Note: I wrote this last week, when I was sick. I am all well now!)
“In my Bible, God tells me to honor the foreigners.”
This is what the pastor’s wife, Hulda, says to me as I’m lying on a cot that she’s set up for me. She’s put the cot in the lean-to along the side of her house that serves as a church building. This is where she and her family sleep when they are sick.
“It’s a holy place,” she says.
She lets me wear shorts at her house, freeing me from the long, heavy skirt I wear in public.
“Your comfort, your comfort,” she says.
I take of the skirt and leave it in a heap on the bed, but one of the girls who lives here picks it up and spreads it out nice and neat on a nearby table.
I lay in the suffocating heat, praying the electricity comes back on soon. When Hulda leans over and says in her sweet, sweet voice, “Jenifer, how is your health?” It’s like my own mother is right there with me.
“I love missionaries,” she says. “They do God’s work.”
Today I don’t feel like I’m doing God’s work, that’s for sure. But He is definitely doing a work in me. I think of all the opportunities I’ve missed to honor foreigners in my country. When I go home I hope Hulda’s words constantly remain in my head. “In my Bible, God tells me to honor the foreigners.”
She reads hers in a different language, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it says in my Bible, too.
