Monday morning, the week before I am to leave for South Africa, I am at my village Women’s Bible Study; I have brought a friend today, the sweet woman you read about a few months ago, who lost her baby in birth. She doesn’t yet know Jesus; she rarely smiles.
I walk with her and daughter Olive through the town and amidst houses to reach our church’s property. There we join about twenty other women, all here to fellowship together and hear a Bible story.
We are going in chronological order now, through the Bible stories, hearing each one and searching for deeper truth in the words, in the concepts, in how they relate to our own lives.
Today we hear about Noah - even this story they have not yet heard . . . I cease to be surprised. I tell it with all the drama I can muster, with gestures, and African phrases and trying my very best to get into their culture with it. Not so hard, really, as Bible times are really so much more like here than like America.
As I am in conclusion, asking “thought questions,” we discuss what sin is, what made God want to destroy the whole earth, and was Noah a sinner?? Big questions with lots to talk about. I am excited to share how Jesus is our Ark. Our safe place to run to, for our lives to be saved, our hearts rescued from destruction. Yet how we have the choice to believe in faith that what God says is true (like Noah) or to laugh (like his many neighbors.) We discussed why we need Jesus.
“For just as through the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of one man, many will be made righteous. Romans 5:19
Only a few stories into the Bible and yet the truth is all there. What will we choose?
A book I am reading (”Seven Days of Prayer with Jesus”) describes our condition this way;
“Imagine all mankind hurtling along a mountain road in a bus. The bus is piloted by Adam and Eve. We begin to speed up. The brakes fail. Lurching back and forth we come to a sharp turn. We can’t make it. We break the concrete barrier and plunge down the cliff. With a terrible crash we slam to a halt. Inside is a mangled mess of broken bones, bleeding and scarred bodies. Everyone is crippled, torn and scarred by this fall, some worse than others.”
As I share the news with my women that I will soon be traveling, they ask me to bring back Bibles and I gladly promise to do so. Some of these women read Rotooro. I warn them that as holders of God’s word they have responsibility to use it! I speak into their lives, asking them to step into their roles as women in the church; to sing, to pray, to evangelize, to teach those around them.
And these women respond by reaching out to me. They surround me with their bodies, and their voices rise in song, the song of prayer. Then voice after voice joins together to pray me on my way . . . .they strengthen me with His strength and I am blessed. Tears streaming down my face, I thank them. God has answered another prayer. The prayer for women of faith here to embrace me as their own and teach me through His love.
God you are so good to me.