We found a park where women who speak our new language meet during the limited hours in the day when women are free for visiting. In the hot months the only time is after sunset. Sunset certainly cools the temperature, but it also makes it almost impossible to spot women wearing black in a dark park. Well, darkness is as light to God, isn’t it? Late one evening we once again dragged ourselves out to do several rotations around the track in a familiar park before heading home. That was our plan. On one of these laps, a young lady came out of the dark and told us “My mom knows you.” We followed her off into the darkness to where her mom (we still weren’t sure who that was) was sitting blanketed in darkness under a tree, in a black body covering. We joined the mom on the ground and started visiting. We had met her before, a refugee from a neighboring country, who was quite pregnant. With the pleasantries out of the way, and her children distracted by play, she opened up her black covering so we could see her clothes underneath which had a huge rip right over the belly. She told us of the abuse she was experiencing from some of the men in her home. We tried to listen and understand, though with our limited knowledge of the language, we didn’t comprehend all the complexities. One of us told her, in our simple way, unsure of exactly how to love her and show we care, “God see’s everything.” That led her to tell us how that evening, instead of covering herself up for prayers, she exposed her torn clothes and said to God, “Do you see this?” We must say we were thankful we left the house that evening, to deliver the answer to her prayer. Realizing that God had heard her cry, opened her up to listening to more of the things we longed to share with her. The next time we saw her in that park, she shared with the other ladies how we were followers of Jesus. We have since heard that her child was born and she is now back in the shadows of the country from which she came. And we believe that like Mary, she is “treasuring all these things up in her heart.”
A true story from Asia