This past week, The Lord has really been teaching our team a lot about joy through the avenue of cultivating gratefulness. The book “One Thousand Gifts” (one you should check out if you’ve yet to read it) has been making its way across the team, along with some participant-led team times relating to this subject.
It has really convicted my heart once again, since originally reading this book last fall.
Yesterday we went out to prayer walk and do village ministry. We returned to a house some of the girls had prayed for the other day to check in on a few women. Since I had gone another direction with a different group the first time, this was my official introduction to someone who’s probably my new favorite human being, Martha.
She was sitting on her bed, working on sewing clothes to sell to provide for herself. Her grey hair was pulled back into a simple, low ponytail and her sturdy body was covered with a teal cotton dress. She had oozing sores covering her lower legs, leading to extremely swollen feet.
It’s almost as if I expected a complaint from her.
Instead, she lit up when we walked in and immediately shared with us what she was working on and gave God praise that her legs were feeling better than they had since we prayed last time we were there. We spent the next few hours attempting to communicate through one of the girls on our team who knows Spanish, met her daughter and others who help her in the village, and drank coffee. We laughed over everything- her attempt to say Spanish words after spelling them backwards, a joke she made up about a cow riding a bicycle to heaven, and her confession that she was nervous that laughing so hard would cause her to pee her pants a little (the point at which I absolutely lost it and laughed harder than I have since I can last remember). As I sat next to her, we would exchange facial expressions that led to cracking up and hugging literally for minutes at a time. At one point, she shared that even though she knew I couldn’t understand her, it was just nice to have someone who would listen and that our laughter gave her energy and health instead of weariness and loneliness. We prayed for her and others in the home before heading out to connect with a few other families, hugged, and said goodbye for the day.
There are many things I could learn from this woman, I realize.
Instead of complaining about what she didn’t have, she fully embraced what she did.
Instead of wasting time and energy worrying, she praised God and laughed wholeheartedly.
And her joy was utterly contagious.
I want to be like that.
This world needs me to be like that.
