Prayer Partners

Today I was overwhelmed with the thought that I have so many people praying for me in America, praying for my safety, warring for me, believing for me, and praying for the strength, Joy, and Love of Jesus be poured out through my life to the people of Liberia, and I just started crying. I started thinking to myself that I am excited to be rejoicing in Heaven with you all and looking at the times when the army of the Lord was so encamped around me that the enemy just had to run away from the presence of God. I know mom and dad you haven’t been sleeping at night and just been praying for me and that means more to me than you will ever know. You are truly my prayer warriors and I am so blessed to have parents who hold me up in prayer like you both do! God is good and as mom always says, “The safest place to be is in the hands of Jesus!” and that is where I daily desire to rest! God is my Portion and my Cup! He is making my Cup overflow! He is my strength and my strong Tower! He is my song when I feel like crying, my words when I don’t know what to say, and my Wisdom when I don’t know what to do!! The JOY of the Lord is truly my strength. So with tears I want to tell you all how much I appreciate you and your prayers and ask that they would continue to come to cover me. You are all warriors and I pray that the Lord richly bless you and that you would feel His presence as you spend time before Him!! I want you to know that I am praying for you all as well and love when the Lord brings one of you to mind during the day! There are so many times that I experience something and with that one of you were here to experiences it with me so that we could laugh about it together later!

I just wanted to send a specific prayer letter to you and give you a better idea of what is going on in my heart and soul. What I feel God is doing in my life here in Liberia. It is so much and truly difficult to put into words but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that God is growing my love and need of Him daily and guiding my passions into alignment with His. I desire to daily give everything I have to Jesus and desire to actively love him with all my heart soul and mind. Like Paul said, I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection.

I cannot hide that fact that Liberia is a hard place to be. There is so much need everywhere and I am tired of people always seeing me as the rich white girl who has never worked a day in her life and never had a want or need that wasn’t met. As I am thinking about it, I really have never been in need like people here in Liberia. I have never lived a day not knowing if I would have enough money to eat. I have never lived a day not knowing if I would be able to go to school because mom and dad couldn’t afford it. People in Liberia live that everyday. They are a people who live in survival mode. Even 5 years after the war they are survival people. It is normal for an individual to go days without eating and I have found out that during the war they used to go weeks without putting any rice in their mouth. Even oranges or other fruit that is here they sell it more than eat it because if they eat it they do not make any money off it.

I just need prayer in wisdom how to respond to the cry of the poor. I want to see people with the eyes of Jesus. I want to be able to truly disciple young women and build friendships. It is just hard when people want you to give them money, and money is something I do not have a lot of but yet, I don’t want to be so attached to the small money that I have that I do not use it to bless those God brings in my life. It is just a minute-by-minute struggle.

I was in the bush all week, Monday through Saturday, and Liberia again amazed me. I met a women who came running into the clinic holding her son, probably about 7 year old, out to me pulling down his pants to reveal a extremely swollen and enlarged scrotum. She didn’t speak a language!!!!! She just made gestures and grunts from her throat. This lady didn’t speak a language!!! I thought it was crazy that I was seeing a woman who lived in this day of age who did not even know a language. The people at the clinic saw this as normal. She left her son in my room and ran out of the clinic grunting and making hand motions and people said she was going back to the farm but no one really knew what was going on. I was in shock and now just laugh about it!! The boy was scared to be in the room with me but I called some of the clinic staff in the room so that when this happened again to this small boy they would know how to reduce the ingroinal hernia this young boy suffered. This is often common among children and usually the child will outgrow the condition but you have to learn how to reduce it and what to do when it happens and I knew it would be impossible to try to explain anything to the mother!!

I had a 25 year old women carried in to the clinic in a wheelbarrow with about 15 other women pushing her and yelling. They carried her into the clinic and put her on the bed. She had taken some “country medicine” two days prior to try to aboard her baby. She had said she was only two months along but it turned out she was four months and was suffering from an incomplete abortion. We did not have any D & C tools in the clinic to perform any type of procedure or exam so I placed two IV’s in her and we gave her some Pitocin to see if we could increase her contractions for her body to expel her baby two young to live. The medicine was not enough so we referred her to the hospital, which is extremely hard for any patient to get to the hospital because of the expense in transportation as well as the hospital fee. Many people have to make the decision they will just have to die in the bush because they cannot make it to the hospital. It was crazy to think that those were the decisions the people in Liberia make!

The bush was good but hard. I have never felt so welcomed in a foreign community as I did in the towns of Bunadin and Duo. The town chief, elders, pastors, youth, and other community members came to welcome us with singing and dancing and a totally of three chicken throughout the day! It was so special! It was the first time in Liberia that I have had three meals a day! It was so good! We were able to go to two markets and I bought a pumpkin to bring home and eat at some point. We got a lot of work done at the clinics and it was neat to see what an effect these clinics have on the people of the town. Each morning at 8 am they have a song and then a devotion and then a health talk for the patients. It was so powerful! I was able to give the devotions some morning and it is powerful to see the faith of the people in these communities. I also learned more about the evil that is so threaded into the lives of the people of Liberia and how the Devil has used fear to hold people in such bondage. The very freedom that Christ suffered for on the cross for us has been suppressed. As I have been reading the Old Testament, many of the struggles that the people of Israel continued to fall into and Moses continued had to seek the forgiveness of the Lord for the Israelites is what the Liberian people fall into. Sexual sins, which is increased because of one-room homes where parents have sex in the same room that their children sleep and soon the children have sex in the same room the parents, are having sex in. Children are becoming pregnant and forced to grow up so quickly. Men with multiple wives and mistresses, fear and jealousy that women deal with quietly because they do not want to be beaten. Drunkenness. Playing with evil spirits such as people who can call the dead back and have them raise and walk around, unable to speak but can follow commands. “Country medicines,” potions that are used to prevent from all kids of evil. Rituals done to women and children that are supposed to prevent from any demonic powers. Women circumcision. Death. Malnutrition among children.

We arrived at one house at nightfall and emptied our bag out of the car and went into our room where a Rat ran quickly out. The kids of the house all grabbed a big stick and chased it until they killed it. As I began to close my eyes I heard the cockroaches first and then I felt them, crawling quickly on my chest and to my neck and I threw one off my neck and heard it hit the wall. I turned on my headlight and grabbed my shoe hoping I wouldn’t hit it so loud that I woke other people in the house up. I killed it and lay back in bed but knew that where there is one cockroach there are many more and from my trip to the outhouse and seeing them all over the wall, I knew that this was a cockroach filled place! I ended up killing a few more during the night and then I just slept with my flashlight on because often light keeps the insects away!! They are BIG here too!!

I went to the high school graduation of Steve, the younger brother of Phillip who is a guy I work with at Equip. I witnessed again the heartache many children in Liberia have lived through. I watched as this 19-year-old boy, who had just finished high school, wept in front of the family and friends who had come to celebrate with him. He wept because his mother and father were not there to share in this joyous and exciting day of his life. He wept because he had finished high school, which Phillip leaned over to me and said, “It is not a easy thing to finish high school in Liberia.” Even through the war he was able to continue with his grade school off and on as he ran from village to village to escape the fighting. He wept as he sang a song that he wrote with the words, “I still have Joy! I still have Joy! After all the things I have been through, I still have Joy! There was a time in my life I couldn’t go on. There was a time in my life when the devil tried to hold me down. But when I got on my knees, convicted by the Lord, He said to me, ‘Son, you still have JOY.’ I still have Joy, I still have Joy. After all the things I’ve been through, I still have JOY!” I started crying as he sang the song because before he had started singing, as I had watched him weep over the fact that his parents were not able to share in this celebration with him, I felt like the one thing the Lord wanted to tell him was, “The Joy of the Lord is your Strength!” Right after I felt like the Lord gave me that prayer for him he said he wanted to sing a song and those were the words of the song he sang. Nineteen years old is fairly young for a high school graduate in Liberia. Phillip and Steve have been living in and out of orphanages since they were young and their mother died a year after childbirth from a reason no one really knew and their father found another wife who didn’t like them. Their father ended up dying early in the war and they were forced into a orphanage all through the war because their step mom did not want to care for them. They experienced running for their life from village to village in the bush during the fighting. While they lived in an orphanage a missionary came to visit them and was impressed with the boys and paid for their schooling so even during the war they were going to school when they could. The brothers were separated when Phillip, who I work with, left to university, which was during the last years of the war. During the last year they have reconnected and began to live as a family again. Phillip told me as we drove away that he never knew that side of his brother. It was a powerful afternoon for me to experience Liberian history. (So a funny side story. One of the uncles bought a goat for the graduation celebration which was a HUGE thing. Maybe close to $100 US dollars he spent on the goat and everyone was so excited to eat it. Well it was my first time eating goat in Liberia and it sounded pretty good…until they brought it out and as I looked at my soup of goat there seemed to be more goat hair then meat in my soup. I quietly passed it to a hungry child sitting next to me saying it was a little too spicy for me! Ummmmmm!)

Here are some of the people God has placed in my life that I want to introduce you to that you may be praying for!

Elijah—a 15-year-old boy in 7th grade who I have gotten to know. I helped him buy a school uniform and now I am helping him buy a pair of tennis shoes so he can participate in Gym. He LOVEs basketball! He is a good kid and I met his mom and sister today at church and his father is a leaper and no longer lives with their family because he wanted to live near the Guinea border. I am not sure about the details of that, if his father is ashamed or if Elijah still interacts much with him father but I hope to just keep sharing the Love of Jesus with Elijah. His mother is a cleaner in the Leprosy and TB compound. He wants to study nursing after high school but it is hard for kids to dream here because they just are setting themselves up for failure because it is most likely that they or their parents will not be able to afford college and it is very hard to get a scholarship or find sponsorship. I am spending one day a week tutoring him in school and we read scripture and talk about God. The funny thing is that I was praying as I was walking home from the office one day that God would bring some young women in my life to disciple and invest time with and I saw these three girls in front of me so I walked fast to catch up with them. They were coming from choir practice and just walking one girl named Louis close to her home. It ended up that I walked Louis the rest of the way home because she lived near where I was staying and we talked about singing together and her teaching me African songs and I teaching her American worship songs and she was excited because she lived really close to where I was staying. It turns out that Louis and Elijah are brother and sister! I met their mom today and the only thing I have really given to Elijah is the school uniform but his mother quietly just said she appreciated my help so much since she has no money right now. It is hard because for a student to get a small job is very difficult so it impossible for Elijah to go to school and try to make money to buy things like shoes, cloths, a backpack. I feel that the Lord brought the family into my life now so pray for them as I try to invest in their lives. I hope to be able to go to their home. Maybe make them something to eat! I just want them to feel the Love of Jesus in my life.

Susanna and Agnus—19 and 16 year old girls who come over on Saturday and help me do my laundry and we eat together, hang out, and have a little devotion together. Yesterday we talked about purity and I asked them what their goals were and visions for their family someday. Being in the bush and seeing the sexual practices of the people of Liberia I just wanted to discuss with these girls what their thoughts and dreams were about a family someday. I wanted to tell them about the man that God desires them to be with is one to first of all loves the Lord with all his heart and one who will want to help you raise a family that loves the Lord! It was a neat time. Pray for more good conversations!

Peterson—a 15-year-old boy who is a patient at the TB center. He has a huge tumor on the right side of his neck with swollen lymphnodes. He had a small mass on the right side of his neck for the last two years according to his father and mother who just show so much love and care for their young son, and over the last two months the mass on his neck grew very fast and they brought him to the hospital where the doctor initially diagnosed with Extra pulmonary TB. After three weeks of initial TB treatment didn’t help his symptoms or chest x-ray the doctor continued the medications but diagnosed his with Lymphoma and his prognosis is death. We just found out today and I need wisdom and grace to love the family who are all waiting to hear what we can do to make their son better. Since I met Peterson I have been praying with him and his family and asking that the Lord would remove the tumor like He has the power to do but for some reason the Lord has not and I only trust that His ways are so much higher than my ways! Just war in prayer with me for this precious boy. Today I taught him to say, “What’s Up!” when I greet him!! The tumor is getting large and is cutting off his airway. He has lost all strength in his lower extremities and is incontinent of urine showing that now he has a lot of spinal cord involvement. Lord, Heal HIM!!!

Larwuo, Patience, Olive, Lorence, Paygar, Victor—Some of my Liberian co-workers that I want to be encouraging to deepen their faith and trust in the Lord their God with ALL of their Heart, ALL of their Soul, and ALL of their Mind!

Christina—my accountability partner who I met in Liberia. Pray that she would be blessed and that she would be comforted and that he times with Jesus would be powerful! She lives in Monrovia so we don’t get to see each other often but the times we do are so fun!

I am sorry this is so long but I just wanted to share my heart with you and mainly tell you how blessed I felt today, overwhelmed with the thought that I have so many friends and family praying for me. The pastor on Sunday held up a $5 bill and asked how much it was worth. Everyone said $5. Then he split in half and asked again how much it was worth now. Everyone said $0. He then talked about how God asked us to give Him ALL our heart, soul, and mind. Not just some of it, or a part of it. If we only give God a part of what he asks for it is almost like giving Him half of a $5 bill!

I love you all and may you be challenged like I was to give the Lord All of myself!!!
Your sister in Christ,
Sarah Joy