Have you ever noticed how much you can tell about how a person is doing that day by looking into their eyes?
Constantly being in countries where I can’t understand what people are saying and translators don’t always tell you everything… I’ve started to pay attention to body language of the people we are ministering to, especially eyes. Eyes show everything that’s going on inside.
One particular morning, I woke up knowing that something big was gonna happen in the village today. The people we wanted to visit that day weren’t around, so we ended up visiting a new house. As we walked along a large cinderblock house, we came across a woman sitting under a row of peach trees ripping some herbs into a bowl. Some rowdy men were playing loud music on her porch, so after some small talk, she invited us inside her kitchen to hear a little better.
As soon as we walked into her kitchen, the discernment in me woke up and I could feel how heavy this house felt. We learned her name was Augustina (I would write her Lesotho name, but I don’t know how to spell it) and in between the men coming in to buy beer that she makes, she started to share about her life. She told us how long she had been married, how she had two children in jail, how she got the giant scar on her forehead when her husband thought she was cheating… the more she revealed, the bigger she would try to smile and laugh her troubles off.
But I couldn’t help look into her eyes. Her chocolate brown eyes were dark, heavy, and clouded with sorrow. Her smile stopped at her lips. The longer I looked into her eyes, the more I wanted to just stop everything and cry. As my team kept asking her questions about her life, I was struggling to hold back my tears.
We learned that she started to go to a Catholic church a couple years back when her husband beat her so that she could pray for healing. This church didn’t teach anything about Jesus, and she had no idea about most of what had happened in the Bible.
So, we started telling her the whole story of the Gospel starting all the way from Adam and Eve. We told her how Jesus came, died, and rose again all because of how much He loves her. How she can be in relationship with God again because he doesn’t just want her to go to church, he wants to know her everyday of the week.
As the story unfolded, Augustina asked more and more questions and shed more and more tears. She decided to give her life to Jesus, Yay! As I looked into her eyes after we had a sweet time of prayer with her, I noticed something different. Where there used to be sorrow and pain, there was a light of hope and joy in those beautiful brown eyes.
We came back to visit her the next day on our last day in the village and answered all her questions about prayer and forgiveness. She said that she told her husband what had happened and he was surprised by it all. We are still praying that he will come to know Jesus too someday!
How I wish that we could have stayed in Lesotho continuing to see how Jesus puts light into broken-hearted eyes, but there’s Kingdom to be built in other places as well. So here‘s to seeing God move in South Africa. Let’s go!
