How did I end up in a foreign land, 12 of us huddled in the shadows of a tiny, dank room with only a flickering candle for light, playing music and worshipping God in Shona, with these beautiful ones I never thought I'd meet, in a high-density township I never imagined I'd walk in? As we sang and prayed together, I realized that the more incredulous the situation, the better. Because God wants us to move into the impossible, to go places we never thought we'd traverse, to touch people we never imagined we'd have the privilege of loving.

I'll never forget how I spent this New Year's in Zimbabwe. It's a glimpse of what is to come. I thank God so much for my friends Marc, Joy and Tino for taking me to this place on such a day. It was dangerous to drive around with the terrible road conditions & the rain, we saw several road accidents, but they wanted me to see this side of Zim too. With these God-sent fellow sojourners, I've made it this far. Bring on 2015! :)

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…]