Last Easter we enjoyed a family Cycling Adventure travelling through beautiful rural landscapes, visiting old villages and spending time sharing with the villagers.
Taking the whole family on holidays is not easy. There’s lots of planning to do to make it a special time for all members and there are hours required to pack and plan for every eventuality… especially if you go on outreach. We took nine families with teenagers, children, even babies and with the single adults we were 38 people in total.
Each morning we took the time to worship and pray together and afterwards we humbly came to the Lord to ask what He had planned for us that day. We received impressions, visions, words of encouragement and Bible verses; many things from Him that helped us to understand His will for the villages we were about to enter. There are so many stories to tell about this time!
This is is just one of those stories.
Unexpected Opportunities
By Jan Stoelwinder Chan
In one of the villages, I stayed on the bus with my younger son because he was sleeping. I thought to myself I wouldn’t have a chance to share about Jesus with anybody that afternoon. Towards the end of this time, our leader called us to all go to the square in that village so we could take a group photo.
As we went, I was just talking with one of my teammates, Esther, when an old lady approached us. Esther said she saw her before, but didn’t have the chance to talk with her. We could see from her behaviour and outlook that she might not have been in her right mind. Esther reached from her pocket and took out a bracelet with five colour beads to give her as a gift.
The old lady refused, and Esther insisted that she wanted her to have it. Then this lady pulled out everything from her bag, an old plastic bag in which she carried around all her belongings, and found some paper money, the kind of fake money utilized for ancestral worship, and forced Esther’s hands to grab it. At that moment we realized that she wanted to pay us something for the bracelet we just gave her.
We were getting nowhere in our sharing when a few other women from the village came and told us that the lady wasn’t in her right mind and told us to leave her alone.
However, they were all staring at the bracelet; they were probably curious at what this was and to why these tourists gave a gift to the old lady that nobody talks within the village.
It was by this simple thing of reaching out to this old lady that we got to talk with all these other ladies who all wanted a bracelet. We were able to share the full story behind the bracelet… the true story of Easter and the Good News of the Gospel.
My heart was filled with amazement for how God can open doors in so many different ways, how we got to share with all these ladies, and even more glad that this old lady could feel loved and cared for.
