New Road...Old Truth

   Where I am living in Swaziland, there is only one paved road, with many dirt roads leading off of it.  Some of the dirt roads are more used than others, and some merely look like a hiking trail.  It is intriguing to see a road & wonder what is down it, but with gas being $5.77 per gallon, I can't afford to follow my curiosity.  Yet this week I was able to go down a new road as we went on a home visit and won't forget how God used that new road to teach me an old lesson.

    The road was pretty good by Swazi standards, meaning not a lot of big rocks & only occasional huge dips.  We still never were able to go over about 25 mph...even on the best part of the dirt road.  As we approached the homestead, you could see all of the extended family's laundry hung out to dry near the few huts where they lived.  There were 2 women hanging clothes, both with babies tied on their backs.  Another woman sat on a grass mat in the shade of one of the huts.  We were here to see a woman in her late twenties/early thirties who is HIV positive and has had a stroke.  We walked over to her hut on the homestead- a modest cinder block building with a metal roof.  As we walked in, she sat up in her bed on the floor with a smile on her face.  Her brother's wife joined us, with a sleeping baby on her back and an abruptly woken, crying toddler ready to sleep on her lap as she sat on the cement floor.

   We entered the home/room, sitting on grass mats & rice bags on the floor, which was wide open and dusty with only the mattress & a shelf in the house.  As we shared bits about ourselves & some Scripture, we asked her if she had a favorite Scripture & in speech, garbled by her stroke, she replied without hesitation, "John 14." 

   Tears welled up in my eyes as we read the truth that Jesus promises us when He said, " 'Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father's house there are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.  And you know the way to where I  going.'  Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?'  Jesus said to him, 'I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.' "

   I have read these Scriptures many times but they hit at a whole new level when a homebound woman who has no earthly hope of healing or wellness speaks them as her favorite passage.  This truth- that Jesus has prepared a place for us, that He will come back to get us, that He is the only way to get to the Father in heaven- is not just a simple truth to be known about in our heads. It is THE truth- THE truth that cant be improved upon, THE truth that changes our hearts, THE truth that you can build your life on...THE truth that you can count on in your death.