I entered the room for the first time, fully aware that the women here have experienced so much more in life than I could even imagine. Their faces tell stories. One woman’s head hung low as her children played. I sat next to the woman who began to pour her heart out to me. She had moved to this country for a reprieve. She had recently married and was separated from her father and mother who still live in her home country. She began to cry as she shared how hard it’s been living here, how civil war has killed family members, and how she yearns for acceptance somewhere.
Unfortunately, her story is typical in this context. In the midst of all this pain, the answer is not money, comfort, or even family, but only one Hope truly satisfies: Jesus. But what does it truly look like to understand and live for that one Hope? Also, for all these people who suffer devastatingly and are apart from Jesus, is their suffering in vain? And if they tell us these stories do we simply respond, “That’s so hard, may the Lord bless you and change this difficult situation”?
I’ve been processing this a lot as a Westerner. Even in the Church we see believers go through a hard time and think that the Lord must not be blessing them; we tend to think that they must not be living rightly if their life is hard. I listened to a sermon from Francis Chan who explains how backwards it would be if we heard the sufferings of a believer and said, “Man, I envy you! That’s so cool you get to suffer for the sake of the Gospel. If only I could be so lucky.” That’s counter-cultural to Westerners.
So now, here, Jesus is teaching me and transforming how I view life as a follower of Him. As I share and watch these women come into a relationship with the Lord, we proclaim together that we are truly joyful in this broken, weary land. We proclaim that those who follow Him will never suffer in vain! Furthermore, there is beauty and purpose in hardships. To the women who currently suffer for none, we share so that they may suffer for the One who is truly worthy of it all.
Thank you all for your loving support and prayers!