Wayfarer By Faith: Prayer

So much has happened in the last fourteen days, it makes me grin like an idiot with utmost gratitude as well as excitement and anticipation for what is yet to come. As if all these things were not enough, another amazing thing transpired this afternoon.

Remember I posted a status on the day I arrived in Zimbabwe on the 6^th of December? I wrote briefly about meeting an amicable white Zimbabwean couple named Bruce and Sue Douglas. On my flight from Johannesburg to Harare, I found myself seated beside them. Interestingly, the lady Sue, decided to strike a conversation with me. I thought that she was being exceptionally friendly. By her accent, I figured she must have been a white South African or Zimbabwean. Anyhow, as the conversation progressed, we soon found out that we were kindred spirits as they were fervent believers in Jesus, just as much as I. You know, it’s funny how you get that ‘feeling’ when you meet people who share the same mind and heart concerning such matters. I just couldn’t shake off the sense that they might have been Christians too. When I asked, true enough, they were.

Sue then jokingly said, ‘Aw, God gave me an easy one today!’ When I gave her a puzzled look, she chuckled and explained, ‘You see, whenever Bruce and I get on a plane, we make a pact to talk to people, and if the opportunity arises, we share with them our faith in God.’ She leant towards me and smiled, ‘Whenever we see a lady in our row, it would be my chance to sit beside her and strike a conversation. If it is a gentleman, it would be my husband’s turn! So today when we walked along our aisle and saw you taking a seat, I was to be the one to sit beside you. I was wondering if you’d put on your headphones as most young people do, then I wouldn’t have the chance to talk to you. But well, you didn’t!’

Funnily enough, my phone was running out of battery, otherwise I most probably would have put my headphones on. Anyway, our conversation turned out to be a most intriguing one! Bruce and Sue told me a bit about their background. Bruce was born in Kenya and could speak Swahili, but he later moved to various cities and finally settled in Zimbabwe, which was then British-ruled Rhodesia. Sue was born a white Zimbabwean. They had two biological children, and two more adopted black Zimbabwean children. 18 years ago, the couple decided to foster and adopt two abandoned babies from a Zimbabwean orphanage, one of whom was tested HIV-positive. It was only about ten long years later that they were allowed to formally adopt these two children – David and Deborah. The regulations concerning adoption are very strict in Zimbabwe. It was certainly no easy route for white Zimbabwean to adopt black Zimbabwean children. Nevertheless, by the grace of God, this amazingly tenacious and faithful couple managed to pull through and take these two children as their own.

They told me how in 2008, when things were so bad in Zimbabwe both economically and politically, that they were forced to leave their farm and flee the country for a time. Many of their fellow white Zimbabwean friends and family left the country for good. But for some reason, Bruce and Sue knew that God would eventually call them back to Zimbabwe. And that is exactly what they did. Despite the dire situation and perpetual uncertainty, they came back a year later and established their farm land and butchery business in the area of Chinhoyi once again.

Now the really cool part is when they told me why they came back. Bruce and Sue knew that God was calling them to reach the people of rural Zimbabwe. Four years ago, Bruce began to take his fishing boat out to Lake Kariba in the north. He would sail along the coast of Kariba and stop by at the rural fishing villages along the way. Knowing nobody, and often finding it difficult to communicate with the villagers, he nevertheless felt that God wanted him to build relationships and friendships with these people. Soon enough, Sue also began joining him on these trips and eventually, they also had friends from other parts of Zimbabwe, Africa and around the world who would go on missions outreaches with them along Lake Kariba. What I loved about their testimony was the way God had inspired them to reach out to these rural Zimbabweans. They told me that all they wanted to do first of all was form trusting friendships with these families. They did not want to give out charitable donations as many other organisations – both secular and Christian – were doing. Over the last four years, these friendships have been forming and the bonds between them strengthened, despite the cultural, racial, and religious and communication barriers. Eventually, when they have had the opportunity to assist these communities and individuals with material aid, the support was regarded not as an impersonal ‘donation’, but as a gift – a symbol of true friendship and caring that demonstrates God’s love to these people in a way that is real, relatable and lasting.

Just before we touched down in Harare, I asked Bruce, ‘What is your prayer for the nation of Zimbabwe and for your work in the rural fishing villages?’

He gave me a knowingly sincere smile and said simply, ‘We are just praying that the people of Zimbabwe will come to know God’s love and its transforming power. Both people in the city and in the villages need Jesus. It will begin with that love.’

As we landed, Sue kindly gave me their business card and phone numbers. She told me to call them as soon as I got my Zimbabwean number, and I would be welcome to visit and stay with them any time that I like while I am in the country! I was so amazed by their open-hearted generosity and genuine willingness to look out for perfect strangers. I could hardly believe it – here I was, having barely touched down in Zimbabwe, and God was already crossing my paths with such incredible folk! Can I say it again (as I often have in many of my recent posts): MIND-BLOWN.

So anyhow, that was the long story of it. Today, after two weeks of pure hectic missions and travel in Harare (and it seems such a long time since my encounter with the Douglas’s), I decided to contact Sue. Now here’s the amazing thing about all God encounters or ‘divine appointments’ as they call it – the timing is absolutely perfect. It turns out that Bruce and Sue will be coming down to Harare (from Chinhoyi, which is about one and a half hours drive north) on Sunday tomorrow, because they are dropping their daughter at the airport. When I told Sue if it would be okay to visit them before Christmas, she immediately offered, ‘Oh tomorrow we’ll be coming by Harare and we can definitely pick you up in the afternoon!’ How easy was that?

They said I could stay for as long as I could. Well the plan is that I want to be back in Harare for Christmas with my friend Marc and his family, whom I’ll have the privilege of staying with during the holiday time. Sue chirped cheerily, ‘Oh no problem, we have a driver and we can certainly arrange for you to be back in Harare before Christmas!’

Can I say it again, mind-blown! You just have to know that these guys are perfect strangers. I chatted with them for about one hour on the plane, and they left their numbers with me, and that was it. I didn’t have to call them again, but for some reason, today I felt compelled to. And it turned out to be the best timing to call. I still can’t believe it. I’ll get to see this other side of Zimbabwe – living with this white Zimbabwean couple and their two adopted children, now teenagers. I’ll get to visit their rural church and also hear more about their missions work along the fishing villages up Lake Kariba. I’ll get to live on a real farm!!! And Bruce has told me about his library of many biographies and Christian literature, he is excited to show me some of his favourite titles. And, Sue has also mentioned that they have an upright piano in their home that I could have a tinker on! Oh my word, I am just so happy and full of joy that I cannot contain it. Thank you God!

It is certainly beyond my imagination and all the prayers I have made before coming to Zimbabwe and even as I was travelling here. I asked God to lead me to the right people. I wanted to experience different sides of Zimbabwe. And now I believe this is one of the many answered prayers! It’s just so cool. Maybe it just seems like coincidence to many, but I know it isn’t – because the kind of people I’m meeting is just way too specific to the kind I have asked God to cross my journey with. It’s this specificity that just takes my breath away. When I started this website ‘Wayfarer By Faith’ before my trip to the Middle East, I wrote in my vision statement that I want to be a wayfarer by faith. I wanted to cross barriers and build bridges across those gaps in between cultures through my music, my words, my life and my faith. It is happening as I have committed it to God. Now I can write about things like this, because it’s really happening as I am taking it step by step. I just want to get to know people in different places, see life through their eyes, share my faith and let others share theirs with me. This is travel, this is missions, and this is living for a purpose and making every opportunity count for God’s glory. Although you and I may fail a thousand times in the making, God never fails you and me.

Today I met the most incredibly inspiring young lady. She is 22 years old and she grew up in an impoverished township in the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe. After encountering Jesus and placing her trust in God at thirteen years of age, when her father passed away - leaving her mom widowed with six children, and homeless - she suddenly found a reason to live. In her desperation and darkest moment of dealing with her father's death, she found God reaching out to her with His unchanging love. And everything changed when she chose to put her trust in God and surrender her heart to Jesus.

She began to look around and see the poverty around her differently. She began to sympathize with those who had life-threatening illnesses or who also had relatives who were dying. God placed in her spirit a boldness to step out and do something she had never done before and seen anyone else do in her slum. She began to visit families - widows and orphans - who were sick, starving or in desperate need. And on her spontaneous visits, she would pray for these people with all the earnestness and love and faith that a thirteen year-old could muster. Since then, she has continued to do this faithfully. Even through the times she didn't know if she could continue school because there was simply no money for it. Even through the most tumultous of days in 2008 when the fragile Zimbabwean economy crashed completely and everything came to a halt. For the white and black Zimbabweans who were a bit more well off, things were bad, but not so bad. For those living in already impoverishes circumstances, like Mercy and her family, it meant certain death. There were no food in the shops, except oil and maybe flour if you were lucky. And even then, what little Zimbabwean dollars you had would prove useless. Because even a trillion dollar note was hardly enough to fill a grocery bag sufficiently. Much less for a family of 7, 10, or even 12 people in some makeshift homes. Mercy told me while shaking her head, "Man, I tell you, that was hard times. People were starving. We had to share what we had, flour, sugar, oil. But if you go hungry, you go hungry."

[To be continued…]

Since I returned from my backpacking and volunteering odyssey in Israel and Jordan, I have been feverishly planning and booking and researching all the things that I need to confirm for my Africa trip this December! I will be going for nearly three months and it will be an exciting journey spanning several countries. I’ll be passing through South Africa, then staying for the most part in Zimbabwe while doing missions, spending some time with a Zimbabwean friend and his family, and also heading to the Zimbabwean-Mozambican border at a small town called Mutare where I’ll be doing some work with Serving in Mission (SIM) and their sister organisation Hope for Aids. I’ll also be going to the land of a thousand hills – Rwanda (!!!) – to visit one of the only music schools there, Kigali Music School affiliated with Musicians without Borders, and to finally meet my Compassion sponsor child of the past two years. Her name is Ntawangaheza and she lives in a village in the southern hills of Rwanda with her family.

After Rwanda, I head to Kenya, my last stop. I will be visiting a project with Spur Afrika in the urban slums of Kibera and then travelling some before I embark on my final project – teaching music at a school in Nairobi while staying with a Kenyan family. Phew. I can’t believe I bought the tickets for these internal flights – even before knowing what I’ll do there or how I’ll get the money. But really, it’s been a step out in faith. As I continued to do my research, I found new opportunities and made new contacts for the places I’d be going to. There always seems to be just enough, from my music earnings and from past savings (although I’ve spent quite a bit travelling to the Middle East). And of course, I can’t thank God enough for the Volunteer Africa grant that I was awarded by Mission Travel Group last year.

You know, I just wanna’ say, I cannot for the life of me have ever conjured – even in the most ludicrous of imaginations – the idea that I’d one day be going to all these places in Africa and also finally getting to meet my Zimbabwean friend as well as my sponsor child in Rwanda. I honestly can only thank God with all my heart, and with my life, because none of this would have been possible without His guidance. As I knocked on many different doors, I asked God to allow the right ones to be open at the best times. And He has. I cannot believe that these are mere coincidences, because they have been way too specific to the things I have prayed about, the things I have asked for, the things that even perfect strangers or friends who had known nothing about my plans have spoken to me about, the things I have journalled in the midnight hours and cried about. This is my story, and I know if there’s a reason I got here, there’s a reason for me to share it.

Two years ago, when I made a trip back to Malaysia with my family as well as travelled in Bangkok, I was convicted to do something different with my life. It sounds dramatic, but at the time, it was simply a prayer from my heart and soul. When I walked the streets of Bangkok and saw the horrible things that most tourists would casually glide past, I felt this compassion within me for the lost and weary, for those sitting in darkness and in difficult places. I believe this passion was being fanned into flame by God himself. Since then, it has grown. This conviction has solidified into something weighty and centripetal in my life, as I continued to dig deeper, read about people from different and difficult places, make connections with others from various cultural backgrounds and religions I never thought I’d befriend, and ask God for opportunities to use my love for music and travel to go where he wants me to go. It all sounds very exciting, but at the time, I was still only eighteen turning nineteen. I had just graduated from highschool the year before and begun my music performance degree at the Melbourne Conservatorium. I knew I wasn’t quite ready yet to travel on my own or to do all these overwhelmingly big things that were in my mind’s vision. All I could do was cry out to God and ask Him to lead me.

Several times, I felt God whisper into my thoughts, either while I was praying, playing music, taking a long walk, journaling or reading my Bible – that He would lead me to places I never thought of before. He would take me to people living in spiritually dark places – people who were losing hope and who were in prison to their own vices or the religion imposed on them by their culture or society. God assured me, through all this, no matter how difficult things seem, how impossible they appear, how far-fetched they are, that I will not lack a single good thing. Since then He has always reminded me to not look to the left or to the right – to not worry about what other people are doing or not doing. I need to focus on what I can do right now and what He has already placed before me. So that’s what I have been doing.

All the stuff I’d been involved in during the past two years – my volunteering at The Song Room not-for-profit organisation and teaching children from Sudanese refugee families, serving with the African church and youth in Dandenong, writing and performing music with my Congolese band, leading a university girls group with Crossway’s Young Adults, solo travelling around Australia and then most recently in Israel, and so much more – has definitely shaped me to be the person that I am. God has and is still preparing me for what is to come.

Admittedly, I’ve made mistakes along the way, I have been untruthful at times to myself and to those closest to me. I have tried to ignore God’s voice, I have disappointed my family in many ways, I have gone astray and done things I’d be ashamed to speak of. But through all this, God has kept me. He really has. His grace and truth has been my anchor. Even though I had made some wrong turns, and I believe last year was a year I was going off track (it was as if the devil himself was trying to stop me from arriving at this pivotal year in my life – 2014 – where I would have all these crazy opportunities open to me), God has brought me back. The thought itself fills me with hope and wonder. God has brought me home! This realization led me to write a song of His unconditional love, and one of the lines goes: ‘How can the God of the universe, love me as His own? Oh just how marvellous this is!’

In the end, I have realized that it’s not about how bad I’ve messed up – though I still might have to face the consequences of my actions – it’s about coming back Home. God loves us beyond our craziest, deepest comprehension. I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing out there in the world that can satisfy me. Nothing at all. I’ve gone there and it’s a dark, bleak place. It’s cool for a while, it’s entertaining for a bit, but then it begins to lose meaning – and then you find yourself lost in the din. It was only in brokenness and tears that I found Yeshua reaching out to me. He always had been. It was I who had slipped away. And He let me, knowing that through my mistake, I would eventually be able to confront the truth and experience His peace with deeper conviction.

In 2012 when I made that prayer while in Bangkok, telling God that I want to do something with my life that would coincide with His purpose for me, I never have thought that two years later I’d be going to volunteer and backpack in Israel and in the same year embark on a trip to Africa. If someone told me that by the time I’m 20, I’d be playing music and talking about faith with some new friends in a predominantly Arab village in north Israel, or that I would be going to see my Zimbabwean friend and my Rwandan sponsor child, all in the same year – I would have laughed nervously and dismissed your lunacy. But it’s happening now. How?

All I can say is that it has happened over time, over months of prayer and committing new things to God, over days and weeks of research and reading, over long walks and tears shed and silent dark nights of the soul. People often think that I make decisions ‘spontaneously’, because I only tell everyone a few months before where I am going or what I’m doing. But in actual fact, it has been brewing in my mind for a substantial amount of time already. Nevertheless, I do also operate quite spontaneously – but that is usually when I’m already on the move! Still, I don’t like telling anyone until I know I’ve got the facts right and I’m actually going to do it. In the past, I have made the mistake of talking about things too early, when I didn’t yet know if I could commit myself to them. I still fall into that trap sometimes, but I’m learning to watch my words.

Honestly, this story is so long, as there are so many facets to the journey. People may ask me why I chose to go to Zimbabwe, why this, why that, and a whole lot of other questions that would take all day to answer. But let’s start with Zim. It’s simple, and it’s quite crazy, to think of it.

Around one and a half years ago, I met a friend from Zimbabwe – not face to face, but through my blog writings on For A Purpose. This guy named Marc sent me a very encouraging message after reading one of my articles about faith and a topic on those lines. We kept in touch because I found that we shared similar perspectives on life and faith and various things. He also wrote really insightful articles on his own website, The Timeless Spectator. Incredibly, we were on the same spiritual journey and shared a similar plane of thought. Just in our written conversations, I was learning a lot. One day we asked each other about our churches, and he was telling me about the amazing worship music that his church band leads. I remember saying, oh one day I hope to visit your church - Celebration Ministries - in Zimbabwe! And I wasn’t just saying it. I remember now that at that moment, I stopped writing to ask God for the opportunity one day to go to Zimbabwe, meet my friend, visit his church and possibly do more than just travel there. Since then, we’ve continued to keep in touch and we exchange voice notes all the time. He has been a real friend, a real encourager and a blessing in my life. I know it’s hard to believe – but I’ve always found it difficult to tell people the full details of the things I do and the encounters I’ve had in various places. They’re always a bit out of the ordinary.

Anyway, since I won the Volunteer Africa grant with Mission Travel Group last December, I had decided I wanted to use it to do some missions work in

Zimbabwe

. My friend Marc, I believe, has truly been God-sent – he has been able to educate me thoroughly about the situation in Zim, and given me a lot of sound advice in terms of travel and outreach. I can’t believe that God could send me someone so like-minded and also passionate about Jesus and empowering young people, who is halfway across the world, to speak into my life and to give me pointers about going to Africa! How, of all websites did he happen to find mine while Googling for something else? I told you, I don’t believe in coincidences anymore.

To be continued…

[I will share about how and why I'm going to Rwanda!]