After checking the oil & water in the car, I drove to the center so that we could make a plan as to who was going where to pick up people for church. I drove up to the team house, and could hear the leadership academy students preparing their song to sing in church. As I waited for our other driver to come so I could give him keys, I checked the oil & water in the other car as the singing washed over me. One of the students came out to greet me, singing "I was glad, very glad, when they said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord.' "
We split up, with the other car going to pick up a family a ways away, with a young woman who is HIV+ and has had a stroke. I went the other direction, passing a 6 or 7 year old girl in a beautiful white dress, carrying a one year old on her back. We stopped first to pick up a wheelchair bound woman who is a double amputee. I pulled outside the gate on the dirt road, and walked through the open fence onto the homestead. The dirt was soft on the ground as I walked in between two of the cement huts to the one hidden behind. The laundry was hanging on the fence & as I greeted the woman I was coming to pick up, she started talking in Siswati. Her granddaughter smiled at me & motioned to come in their hut. The woman pointed to her bowl of water & made it clear that she wasn't finished bathing yet, so I stepped back outside to wait for her. The young granddaughter then pushed the wheelchair outside of the hut & turned it around so that the grandma could crawl on the floor of the hut & push herself up into the chair. After we got her into the car & the wheelchair in the back, I started to pull away from the gate, to continue down the dusty road. A young woman from the homestead across the way motioned for me to slow down & brought her preschool aged son to the car & asked if he could go to church. As he only saw white people in the car, he had a terrified look on his face that quickly turned to relief as he saw the other Swazis in the back.
Our next stop required me to pull the car through a narrow drive, with a fence on one side & plants on the other. As we pulled up close to the house, a young girl was outside with a brand new baby on her back, trying to put it to sleep. The grandmother that we had come to pick up lost her sight within the last month due to glaucoma, so her daughter was walking her out to the car. It happened fairly quickly, and through it God has opened her heart & she talks about the eyes of her heart & spiritual sight. She fumbled her way into the car & sat down and we headed back to church.
We pulled up to the church in time to see the other car unloading. A young man in his early twenties carrying his older sister (the one with HIV & a stroke) over his shoulder into the church building; a woman with polio & a crutch walking in; an old gogo with a wooden stick for a cane; a teenage mom with a brand new baby who lives too far away to walk. We unloaded our van, pushing the wheelchair into the church, guiding the blind woman into her seat, keeping the young boy with us who was experiencing church by himself for the first time.
The singing was already started, so I took an open chair in the back of the sanctuary as they sang in Siswati about heaven. As I thought of each of the people we brought & the freedom they would one day experience in heaven, I can imagine them worshiping there...unhindered by disease & disability; able to see, to dance, to sing. As my thoughts continued down this road, I saw a glimmer in the sun & looked over the shoulders of the people in front of me to see the double amputee grandmother wheeling her chair around to dance to the music. It's times like these when the lines between earth and heaven get blurry & I am once again reminded of the privilege it is to be able to walk to worship, stand for the songs, read the Bible & worship in freedom.
"I was glad, very glad, when they said to me,
'Let us go to the house of the Lord.' "
Beautiful....felt as if I was walking and driving with you. I know that feeling you wrote about...where the line between heaven and earth blurs.....♥♥ Love reading your posts.
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