When being a world changer looks different than you ever imagined...

The phone rings and I can tell by the number that it's my husband calling me on his Ghanaian vodafone.  He's forgotten how early it is here, so I'm not yet fully awake.  I try to listen and make sense, which is a struggle before I've had my morning coffee.  I ask about the different team members from our church that are with him there to help work on the orphanage.  Sometime during the conversation he tells me about his morning.

He got up early before the rest of the team in order to have some quiet time.  He got ready, (as best as he could with the power out and no running water), and went outside to sit on the large porch of the retreat center where the team is staying.  As he tells me, I can picture it vividly from my time there two years ago.  I can see what he's seeing, smell the smells of Kumasi, hear the sounds.  

He tells me that he can hear Augustina, who lives across the rutted red clay street.  As she is outside scrubbing her laundry, she is singing and worshiping the Lord.  She looks up and sees him and greets him, "Hello, Daddy!", she calls to him, her greeting one of respect and affection. "I'm just praising the Lord!"  She goes on to tell him about the package sent with my son-in-law and the team to her from my daughter, who was unable to take the trip this time due to her pregnancy.  Then she says something to him that brings him to tears, and me to tears as he relays it to me, "Your daughter, she is like Jesus to me."

She was our strong-willed child from the moment she left my womb.  But, once that girl set her mind to serve the Lord, she did it with relentless determination.  She was going to be a world changer for Jesus, but evidently how she pictured that happening and God's plans were two vastly different things.  She tells a bit about it in this post.  This morning, I pondered this after my phone conversation with my husband.  I thought about how we forget that this is how we become a world changer, by changing one person's world.

I think about Jesus, and wonder what the lasting fruit was from feeding the five thousand.  I wonder how many kept following Him once the loaves and fishes were gone.  Yet, it's different when we read about Jesus encountering the woman at the well. We read about the results of this encounter.

She was a social outcast, because she was a woman, because she was a Samaritan - a half-breed Jew, because she had a "history" with men having been married five times and was now living with a man she wasn't married to.  We read that Jesus "had to" go through Samaria.  He had a divine appointment to keep with this woman.  In the course of their conversation Jesus tells her all about her past and reveals Himself as the Messiah.  This is what we read recorded in John chapter 4 about the results of this encounter, 

39 Many Samaritans from the village believed in Jesus because the woman had said, “He told me everything I ever did!” 40 When they came out to see him, they begged him to stay in their village. So he stayed for two days, 41 long enough for many more to hear his message and believe. 42 Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not just because of what you told us, but because we have heard him ourselves. Now we know that he is indeed the Savior of the world.”

Maybe you can relate to my daughter, you want to be a world changer for Jesus but things just aren't going the way you imagined them.  I want to encourage you to ask Him to show you who is your woman at the well, your Augustina, your next divine appointment.  Then go be a world changer, one by one by one. 

still following, 

     

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