Hope

Yodit is one of the Burayu guardians.  Her daughter is named Elshiday (God Almighty… all the names in Ethiopia have meanings.  It’s cool.  And an easy conversation starter).   She has been the group leader for the group Tokuma (Unity) for almost 3 years now, so she’s a ways into the program.  Tokuma has started a spice shop business, but it isn’t as successful as they had initially planned and Tokuma has experienced a LOT of conflict.  We had a “conflict resolution” meeting a couple weeks ago with them – it was a 4 hour meeting that consisted of giving everyone a chance to say how they were feeling about the program/group dynamics/business… we pretty much just forced them to talk to each other. Although it didn’t solve everything, it got a LOT out that needed to come out, and a lot of the women wound up apologizing to each other and coming together to figure out how to move forward.

So that’s the backstory.  Yodit is AMAZING.  Over the 3 years that she’s been in the program, she has moved three times, each time to a smaller house (for different reasons – the land owner randomly significantly increased the rent, the owner of the compound decided he wanted to tear her house down and build a bigger house for his family, etc.) She now lives in a room the size of my closet with a bed, dresser, and enough space to squeeze between the two to get into bed (literally, you walk into the house and hit the bed).  When she was first handed the keys to Tokuma’s business, she said she the verse that immediately came to her mind was Nehemiah 2:20 “The God of heaven will make us prosper”.  She wrote the verse on a sign and hung it up in her shop as an encouragement to the rest of the group.  Since that moment, everything has kind of turned to shambles.  Her group started falling apart, the business was anything BUT successful, and she was in the middle of moving yet again. 

But Yodit has INCREDIBLE hope and faith.  She said that as her house gets smaller, her hope that the Lord will redeem her gets bigger.  She came to Ambo with us to teach beads to the guardians last Weds. and spoke at their meetings to encourage them, both in Christ and in the program. 

I was humbled and amazed.  Here I am, getting discouraged at the slightest setback.  The second I feel like my faith is challenged, or something I’ve invested in fails, or I pray for something that doesn’t immediately come to light, I’m like “God, where you at? You’re obviously not real/not who you say you are/I’m making all this up”.  And I look at Yodit, and in the back of my mind I think “How long is it going to take, or how many times are you going to have to fail, before you just give up?” But it’s AMAZING because she doesn’t.  Because Yodit understands what it means to hope in Christ.  What it means to see her group falling apart and to wake up the morning before their meetings and pray for each one of them, even those who aren’t speaking to her, by name.  “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.  In the world you will have tribulation.  But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33) – that verse is REAL to her.  Yodit understands that this world is going to be HARD.  But that she has an unfailing hope in Christ (“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is IMPERISHABLE, UNDEFILED, and UNFADING, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.  IN this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith – more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire – may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ”. 1 Peter 2:3-7)

Yodit’s faith is tested EVERY day.  But as she pointed out when drawing an analogy to what her group is going through, it is being tested by fire, so that in the end it “may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ”.

Thanks to Yodit (and lots of the other guardians) I’m learning that hoping in Christ doesn’t mean that we’re hoping that life is going to be easy on this Earth.  It’s clinging to the promise we have that He has victory over this world.  And that even though it’s hard and the physical circumstances might not ever get better, we have Christ and NOTHING can separate us from His love (Romans 8:35 – 37).  Yodit rejoices in her sufferings because she knows that God is with her.  It’s a kind of faith that I don’t see often but that I’ve been overwhelmed with this summer (mainly through Brittany, Yodit, and Kes Cimdii).  It’s also one of those things that I can listen to sermons on/preach to myself/read about, but it doesn’t actually mean anything until I actually see it.  So I’m still praying for that kind of faith because I hope in a whole lot of other things (getting to eat 3 meals a day, good grades, being successful in my involvements, being recognized) that when they fail, are big setbacks both emotionally and in my faith.  And I’m thankful that I have the opportunity to see people who have taken hold of what it means to actually hope in Christ.

 “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” Romans 5:3-5

Sorry about the lack of posts... the 1st of the month means we have to reset our internet, and that's just a whole bunch of complicated.  More to come!