Monday, Jan 21, 2016.
Lavender Hill is a suburb of Cape Town. Approximate 250,00 people. And also the location of Pastor Ivan’s church. On Monday Ivan took us door to door to pray with each household and to give them words of encouragement. We would be invited in to visit the families. And some families know the Lord.They would ask for something specific in prayer. Other families did not and Pastor Ivan would ask u to encourage them.
I kept wondering how in the world do we encourage someone who had to wait 20 years or more for a roof over there heads. How do we encourage someone who is out of a job and can’t find any work in order to feed their family. And I didn’t get the answer right away.
But then I realized God is the ultimate hope. We, and I mean all people, can’t encourage without knowing who God is. This is when a certain song came into my head. The first verse says this,
I hear the Savior say,
Thy strength indeed is small;
Child of weakness, watch and pray.
The second verse continues by saying:
Find in Me thine all in all.
Lord, now indeed I find
Thy power and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
and melt the heart of stone.
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.
This is song is called Jesus paid it all.
Something that is so evil and corrupted, so destructive has been taken away. Jesus paid it all. And THAT is what gives all of us hope. God has so much in store for his people. And I am ready for Him to use me. He has given us all tools to encourage and to bring love and hope to all that need it.
Personally, God has given me so much hope. In so many different ways.
One way is how he has always protected me.
He protected me when I was adopted, into a family who loves God and a family who loves me.
He protected me and my family growing up. He blessed me with an amazing childhood with my brothers being my best friends.
God protected me in high school when I was causing all sorts of trouble for my parents and for myself.
God has protected me by leading me to Grace University. He has blessed me with amazing friendships that to this day encourage and pray for me.
He has protected me in my travels to South Africa and he will continually protect me. Those are only a few things that give me hope, through God.
Growing to know God better and learning who he truly is, but honestly it’s only a glimpse because God can’t be put into a box. All that God is and will be is the reason I have hope. And now i’m excited to see how God uses my hope to bring hope to others.
