My beautiful friend Erin sent me such an encouragement last week. Here is a snippet. “Then I asked God to speak to me for Andy. Straight away I saw a bunch of bright red, beautiful poppies. I then saw a picture of you dancing with a basket full of these same poppies, you were smiling and singing and skipping along in a colourful long skirt giving them to people. You were coming in to people's situations and lives and bringing His joy to them as you handed out these poppies. Their faces would light up as you came and gave these poppies away. This is who you are! A joy bringer! You were having so much fun doing this.” I’m not writing this to blow my own trumpet, I just think God is very cool because it was just a few days after this that I got to see the picture become a reality. I had organised a ‘birthday party’ for my friend’s ‘adopted’ daughter, because they don’t know when her real birthday is or how old she is, and I thought it was pretty sad that she consequently just wouldn’t ever get to have a birthday. We held it out front of his boutique, and I brought along my face paints. While we were waiting for her to arrive, I started by painting my kids. Every person that walked by stopped and stared, smiling and laughing. I realised pretty quickly it is something people here never see! Some looked very interested so I told them to come over and I did theirs as well, and they were very happy, skipping away covered in flowers and lovehearts. The kids arrived, laughing as they saw what was happening, and I did theirs too, and everyone that saw them laughed. I was thinking of the picture Erin had sent me and my heart was happy realising that God could see me and was using me to spread joy, even in something so small and simple.
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Sitting on the hospital bed with a friend and her daughter, I count out the money she needs for medicine over the next 4 days. It’s around $70. Medicine for AIDS patients and babies 1-5years old is free, but everyone else, for everything else, has to pay – before treatment. She says to me, “It’s like something pulled you to come and visit me on Thursday night. You said she really needs to be on ‘serum’ (a drip) and the next day the doctor said we need to put her on serum. You drove us to the different hospitals, going here and there in the heat, and she is getting the treatment she needs now. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, it is God doing these things.” In thinking about what we’d be doing here, I didn’t expect how much we’d be in hospitals and health situations. But as we get involved in people’s lives, particularly when they are so much poorer, this is one of the major needs that just keeps coming up. They can’t afford medical care, and there is an epic amount of infections and illnesses in this country. It’s something that is very easy for us to do, but means so much to them. My friend’s son comes over, his feet are too sore to go to school. I wash them and put medical cream on them, bandage them up and put him in and the kids in front of the telly with some multivitamin lollies. It’s some sort of fungal infection that’s eating away all the skin on his feet. He will need something more, but it’s a start. We pray for healing for them all, whether we know them or not. So far nothing miraculous in that way is happening. I wonder if the spiritual atmosphere here is just too dark. Jesus sometimes took people out of town to heal them (Mark 8:22-26) – sometimes he couldn’t do miracles in certain areas. (Mark 5:5-6) I have no idea, though obviously we won’t stop praying. It seems like the acts of love in caring for people when they are sick mean more to them anyway – maybe this is what God is prioritizing. An avenue for His love to come through and slowly melt people’s hearts. That’s what we have often prayed for – ways to show love here, in a culture so different to our own, that we are still getting to know. Pray with us that whatever acts of love we can give will turn people’s hearts towards the one who loves them so much more – so they can live with Him both in and beyond this life. Often when things are hard it’s easy to long for the carefree days of my youth. Maybe that person will resurface, I wonder, maybe I will someday be the same Andy I once was. But there is a danger there in not being content with who I am at the moment, in these seasons of life (mainly since motherhood). As I was praying with some others this week and thinking about it, God gave me a picture.
I had a picture of when I used to do clay at uni, as well as more recently at home. So often when doing clay on the wheel (for it was not my strong point, I was a sculptor) I would make things, let them dry, then decide they were no good and break them up and throw them back in a bucket of water, which after a few days I would reconstitute and knead until it was good to use again. I realised, like God talks about us as the clay and He as the Potter, that even though God made me something for a large portion of my life, he may well have decided He’s through with that and is breaking it apart, soaking it for a while, and then remaking it… and that is completely up to Him! Just like it was up to me when it was my clay. Now He is the Potter, I am the clay. For some reason I felt like in that moment I could let go of the past. I didn’t have to long that ‘that version’ of Andy would resurface, it’s been broken apart and chucked in the water and now I am being made into something different. The thing about making stuff on the wheel, too, is that it has to be ‘centred’. If the lump of clay isn’t centred, your whole bowl/cup/vase will be out of shape, lopsided, or won’t even work. It takes the majority of your time to centre the clay, and a much smaller amount of time to make the pot. This was often a reason why I broke up old attempts to use the clay again, the next attempt more centred. If this is what God is doing in me, perhaps I don’t feel like a new vessel yet because God is making sure this one is centred properly in Him. Remembering that this is the longest and most important part of the process, I take heart. Yesterday I went for a walk to find the clay pots that are made near where I live. I walk on the dusty sand ‘roads’ intermittently interrupted by rivers of sewerage, past the mountain of plastic rubbish which is a local ‘bin point’ – strewn with goats and the odd child or dishevelled man looking for goods that can be used for another purpose; or eaten. It stinks. Either side of me are mud walls or straw and stick fences which enclose compounds, kids outside each one playing in the dirt. They yell “Fofo Anasara!!” “Hey, white person!!” and are delighted when I reply or shake their hands. The sun is beating down, it is 10am but already around 38 degrees. Cows, donkeys and goats are hanging around like the children, outside their compounds or en route to find fodder. Women pass me with loads on their heads, colourful clothes and headscarves, babies strapped to their backs, and we greet each other in French or Zarma. After about 800m of different roads, I find the area amongst all the other compounds where the pots are ‘fired’ – piled up in a hole in the ground and covered with bundles of dry sticks, corn and millet stalks that are burning away. There is no one to be seen so I find a bunch of men sitting under a hangar (a stick shelter) and ask where the women are that make the pots. One of them tells me he will show me so I follow him down a narrow path behind a mud brick home and find a handful of women sitting on mats on the dirt under the shade of a large tree. I smile as I realise one of them is kneading clay between her legs as she sits, and some men in the background are breaking up piles of mud and shovelling it with water to make new clay. CLAY. Yes! I go up and sit on the ground and greet them in zarma which is the most common language in my area. They are older women and smiling at me, but looking at me like I am very strange. They would rarely see a white person, let alone talk to one, let alone have one visit. They talk some more to me in zarma and I say I only know French and a little bit of Fulfulde. Great, they say, we are Fulani. And they start talking to me in Fulfulde. I can hardly understand and so a younger woman with a baby and a toddler comes over and she asks me in French what do I want. Do I want to buy a pot. No, I say, I just want to watch them make the pots, I used to do it where I come from and I want to see them here. So I am welcomed and brought a chair. It is an interesting process and one that is modified so that untrained people would be able to reproduce it. After kneading the clay, (dug from the ground somewhere) she gets an already made pot, and places the other clay over the top, patting it down with a flat rock followed by a wooden spatula until it resembles the shape of the pot underneath. Do you do it like this, they ask. No. I am restraining myself from grabbing some clay and having a turn. Maybe another time. Another woman is breaking apart old dry clay with two rocks, making it into powder to be reused. I watch her and think of the picture God had given me the week before. She smiles a lot and after a while decides she is tired so she lies down where she is with a giggle and starts to take a nap. After I sit with them for an hour I ask if I can come again and watch and listen to them speaking Fulfulde. Yes, there is no problem, you can come. It’s easy to want to stay inside our comfort zones, but at this point in our Niger experience there’s not much choice. You either stay inside the walls of your own home and slowly disintegrate, or you take a deep breath and try another adventure until God opens doors and over time things become clearer and the relationships and situations He wants us to be a part of evolve. Brad is much better at it than me – He jumps in to one hundred crazy situations without blinking an eye, and comes home with a story every time. If you are praying for us, please pray for courage and wisdom, and God’s leading and divine appointments. Thank you! Let me tell you about a girl, who was 11, and every day she walked home from school she got a headache. She tried going to the chiropractor, she tried going to the doctor, and she even had a catscan but noone really knew what was wrong. When she was a teenager she so often had to pull out of seeing her friends due to migraines that they thought she was making it up. There were so many times she laid in bed wanting to be somewhere else. As she got older she tried more often to push through the pain and go anyway, but she would usually come home vomiting. She missed her best friends 18th birthday, collapsed mid way through a yr 12 exam, but being young and without responsibility she could usually conk out in bed for 24hrs without much turbulence to everyday life. Still, she tried natropaths and oestopaths and acupuncture. To no avail, she carried through into her twenties and began teaching. Sometimes she would lie under her desk inbetween classes, hoping the medication would kick in and she could continue her days work. She ran out of sick leave and her friend in charge of leave began to let her go home without putting it on the books. She tried prayer ministry. For years, with different people and the same people. She got pregnant and nothing changed – in fact there was three months straight of migraines every day… so in deciding about more children: the sooner the better, so she could nap while the first baby napped to get through the second pregnancy. When her kids got older, they started to pray too, with exuberant faith. ‘Jesus I pray you would kill that headache now!! – Now mummy, get up!’ – Hunter, 3yrs old. Between the kids and Brad, sometimes the pain would go, maybe 5 times out of every 100. She was prayed for by all manner of family and friends and pastors and visiting preachers and travelling conference leaders. Her faith grew and then it dwindled, it grew again and then it dwindled. She truly believed God wanted to heal her. When she gave up hope, it was God that brought someone along with a word of knowledge or a dream or an opportunity that encouraged her to try again. She tried preventative medication, supplements, diets, she went to neurologists, she did hormone tests. She wanted to do mission and it was health that was the hold up. But God never told her to wait until she was healed. On the contrary, he said ‘Go in the strength that you have.’ So eventually she was let loose to the nations, and the migraines continue. A lot.
This girl and woman is one most of you would describe as joyful and carefree, bringing fun and laughter into the room. I am that person. I love being that person. I don’t want to be the sick person. The hardest thing about my health is seeing how it discourages people around me and how often I let them down. I feel like I am a hindrance to my family, a burden not a joy. People worry, people care. So what? So what is God doing? Where is He in it all? What can I do? What does He say? Well, I don’t really know. There are so many questions. Who’s responsible for bringing the migraines along? Is it the enemy who brings sickness and disease? Yes. But if God is really in charge of everything, is it He who brings it? No. If I for a moment believe the sickness is from God, there is a contradiction in that He deeply loves us, and came to die for us to heal all our diseases. He is the Healer, not the destroyer. But if the sickness is from the devil, is the devil more powerful than God and the prayers of His saints? Of course the devil is not as powerful. So why does the battle still rage? Is it my fault? Have I sinned? Am I not fully surrendered? I have searched this out to no end through prayer ministry. I can’t imagine there is any stone left unturned before God. Who’s responsibility is the healing? If God says He wants to heal me, (and He has) why doesn’t He? Is it up to God to heal outright, or up to His saints with everything He has already equipped us with? He tells us to do the healing, but I’ve cooperated any way I know how. There have been bursts of faith, and to be honest, I saw more breakthrough when I had more faith. But even faith is not something that can appear of my own making, it is a gift from God. And for every moment of faith building, there has been 50 of faith breaking. Letting go of trying to make it happen has been one of the harder theological battles – surrendering that God is in charge, regardless of whether I am supposed to be doing more from my end or not, He is God. Is healing the goal? I believe that He is in charge, that He loves me, and that He wants the best for me. So if He hasn’t yet healed, then perhaps He is doing something greater than healing? Perhaps the migraine is very bad for now, but very good for something in eternity? Perhaps it is very bad for my body, but very good for my faith? Perhaps it is very bad for my capacity, but people see that I still have joy and love despite the struggle, and it encourages them? Perhaps if I was pain free I would love this life more than the next, or more than Jesus, perhaps I wouldn’t be so willing to surrender it to Him? These are ideas that float when I’m in a not-so-discouraged place, but they are still questions, not answers. It’s important to ask these questions. I’m surrounded by situations and lives in epically worse predicament than my own. I have to know the God and the truth I am pointing them towards. I can’t give false promises. They want to know the answers, it’s not enough to say ‘well sometimes He intervenes and sometimes he doesn’t’ – that’s not something to build a foundation on. What about Heaven? I tell you what I want, and what I see make the difference in other people – is such a deep revelation of Heaven and the joy of our eternity with Jesus that it completely transforms this life. Nothing can prevail against the hope of Heaven. So lately, when the discouragement comes, this is what I hold on to. 1. Our hope cannot only be in seeing God’s goodness in this life – it must be even more anchored in the hope of the life to come. “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” 1 Corinthians 15:19 “Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.” 1 Peter 1:13 2. While it remains, there is purpose in the pain. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” 2 Corinthians 4:17 “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” 1 Peter 1:6-7 3. As always, God loves me. Even when I don’t understand. “Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.” Psalm 73:23 |
AuthorWe are Brad, Andy, Hunter and Belle. Hoping to keep you connected! Archives
May 2019
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