Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: FAITHFULNESS (10/07/21)
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TITLE: Oroma Grace - Part 3 | Previous Challenge Entry
By Linda Lawrence
10/13/21 -
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“Mummy, I got one new female adult who didn’t know how to read and write her own name. She is slow to learn but I have hope that God will open up her brain, and give her the knowledge to see what I’m teaching her clearly. She ask me how much she pay me to teach her. I tell her, never mind about the payment, God will pay me.”
Nothing Grace could have said to her new student would have thrilled me more. God is getting the glory! The school fees I paid for Grace to attend high school in Uganda may have been the best investment I could have made for her and for the Kingdom of God.
“Each time when I am teaching her she says, please help me. Her mind worries with so many things. I tell her, Sister, in this world today you have to lay all your burdens onto Jesus who cares for you. He is willing to do anything we ask in Jesus name. Oh! That put a smile on her face and she wants to know more about Jesus.”
I remember struggling in prayer, wondering how to help Grace, exiled in Kenya by the Covid-19 pandemic, without making her dependent on me, an American. I pray her dream of coming to America will be transformed into dreams of serving Jesus in the Kingdom of God—wherever she is.
I know God wants her depending on Him! What has He provided so far? Grace and her baby share a rented room with a friend. Grace has a Bible, a smartphone, and her English high school education. Everyone Grace knows in the village worries about rent and food and medicine and school fees. My prayer is for God to show Grace a way to be a blessing in her place of exile.
Grace thinks perhaps having a shop selling necessities could make a profit. But since there are two other shops in the village, her business (if I gave her seed money to start such a business) would take profit away from someone else’s struggling business. That would not bless the village.
For a year Grace and her friend worked together at whatever they could, hauling water, washing clothes, selling chapatis, barely eking out a survival existence but seeking and seeing God’s provision in the timing of rainfall and in friendship and in our Bible studies that we are able to do together online. Grace loves learning and often writes of wanting to share with others what she is learning in our Bible studies.
My sister has followed Grace’s story with more than interest. She wants to send money, but I discourage “sponsorship”, fearful of giving Grace advantages over her fellow struggling villagers, making her vulnerable to others' jealousy or her own dependence on a handout. How can we bless her in a way she can be a blessing?
God makes a way! We have joined in a 3-way business partnership. Grace has no possibility of getting a Kenyan ID and without that she is financially helpless. So we are paying her the equivalent of what she could have charged as school fees if anyone had been able to pay. We have been able to provide her with a tablet and digital teaching materials designed by Frank Laubach, the missionary author of How to Teach One and Win One for Christ. Together, we have hired her as a full-time missionary teacher—our representative in Kokotoni Kenya.
Grace now has seventeen students, adults and children, that she is teaching one-on-one at this point, with the hope of making each student realize they are individually important to Jesus. The goal is to give free lessons–with large doses of compassion–demonstrating Jesus' heart and free gift of salvation.
“This teaching business is bringing so much change in my life of which I’m grateful to God for. Sometimes I sit in a quiet place, and wonder of the goodness and greatness of the Lord in my life from the time I was a baby, up to now that I have a baby. I tell God, you are Awesome, and nothing compares to you. And sometimes I find myself crying for no reason.”
Grace finds herself crying; and I find myself singing. GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS, O GOD OUR FATHER . . . ALL WE HAVE NEEDED THY HAND HAS PROVIDED . . .
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