Lives Be Healed….
(normal homes)
I’ve been learning a lot about the tangibleness of God’s love, and even though that sounds elementary, it should change your world. More than saying or believing that God really loves you, to hold a child in your arms tightly that lacks basic care and they won’t let go. Remember how many times we’ve ran away and then came back to the Lord, only to see that He never wanted to let go. Or sitting in a room at night with six orphan boys who have no memory of a mom and dad, reading them a bedtime story with them laying on your shoulder or lap, then you tell them how much you love them, you start to see how much God, the real Father, desires to sit down with you and tell His story He has for you. When one orphan says to you, “One day there was a little kid named Deide (affectionate term for older brother) John and there was another little boy named Alvin, and they met and loved each other forever.” These boys don’t get the love that any normal family would, and God being their Father is a whole new meaning.
My secondary ministry here has been prison ministry at a jail that’s about a ten minute drive from where we are staying. Back on Monday we were greeted at the entrance with about five guards with M-16’s and large colorful bullets, only to find out we were turned away. In a couple of days, after getting some approval from the governor, we prayed on the way their yesterday that we would get in and get to minister to the inmates. When we arrived the gate was wide open and no one was there, and we were like “Wow!” Once we got in, we were patted down, stamped on our arms with a “jail visitor” stamp (don’t rub that off!) and then we went to a worship room where they have chapel. All of a sudden about 100 or so detainees flooded the room as one guy had a guitar and a couple of mics in other hands. Our team introduced ourselves as they gave us an ovation each time, then all of a sudden worship just bursted out in the room. My expectations of us walking into this place, giving food and trying to share Jesus with tough guys and play basketball just shifted. For the next fifteen minutes our small team of Racers was worshipping our Father with 100 or more prison inmates that were in passionate worship! After that they split up the group and each of us got to sit down with 15 or so of them and share our stories and they got to ask questions. Pretty soon I am going back to continue building relationships and play some basketball. They were so nice.
Eyes Be Opened….
This morning I just got back with an N Squad team and a girl named Josie who lives and works here. I was told yesterday that they were going to visit a blind lady who was in a poor community and I decided to join them. We got dropped off in a poor community of one room wooden shakes, took a walk through the dirt road and small wooden bridges to a small wooden one room house. Sitting on a large wooden flat board was this little girl named Nikkae, around nine years old, and she was blind. She lived in the place alone because her parents separated, mom nowhere to be found, and a dad who is in the same community who doesn’t have anything to do with her. A small blind girl who lives and does everything in her whole life in this wooden room. She doesn’t get food everyday and is lucky to have people visit her. Josie came to meet her to see if we could get some people who work with blind children to take care of her. Her skin was spotty from a lack of being taken care of and as her eyes were closed, she smiled like she had the greatest gift ever. She never stopped smiling and she helps our hands softly hanging on to life, knowing that what she’s going through isn’t fair.
She loves to sing, and there in this dark wooden shack and on a wooden mat, she sung a song about how God is good in her language of Tagala. It was the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard and how can a child sing of the goodness of God when she lives alone, born blind, lack of food, and who knows that hope is there?
Christ is revealed…
You want to see Jesus? You can find him in a chapel room full of 100 prisoners who’ve gone through a lot in their life, but God never gave up on them. They have all found Jesus, according the men. Men who are behind tall concrete walls and prison bars worshipping from their heart like they were just set free. There’s no spiritual bondage or chains, because they know God was bigger than that jail. But yet, why doesn’t our worship when we aren’t in this situation like this? Is it the spiritual bondage we have of “how people might look at us”, our struggles, our fears of what the Spirit really could do in our worship if we let him? Why does my worship become so vain when I’m not the one sitting in a prison with numbers on my skin and their looks real? Have we forgot the greatness of the grace of God? That our chains are gone, and we’ve been set free!
And what about this little girl? She sung about the goodness of God when all she’s known is life in a small wooden room where she eats, sleeps, and bathes if someone helps her. That her whole life is completely dependent on people taking care of her, after her parents abandoned her. That she will never see life through her eyes, the beauty of a sunset or sunrise, the smiles of children laughing, and the beautiful creation of the Philippines. And she sung about the goodness of God? She never stopped smiling, and God has given her this voice that from the lips of children He ordained praise! Here am I, born with sight, with a family that loved me and took care of me, that I grew up not knowing what it was like to have “want”, and I struggle to be “in the mood” for worship. She sings about the goodness of God, because it’s about the only goodness she has right now to live on. That she was blind, but how she sees a whole lot more of God and His love than I ever will.
