I have had my hair braided in Madagascar three times. The first time was by one of the girls at the church who did a beautiful job. She just did it quickly the night that we went with the youth group to see the fireworks for Madagascar’s Independence Day last summer. The second time was in a village while I was surrounded by women and girls and children, all trying to help while laughing about the fact that the white girl was getting her hair braided.
And then there was tonight. On tuesday my sister, my two housemates, and I are going to spend a week out in a village. In preparation we got our hair braided, since that would be the easiest way to keep our hair out of the way and semi-clean for the week. Hannah had three of her friends from church come over and braid our hair and have dinner with us. What sweet, beautiful ladies! Their skill and speed were amazing, but what really got me was their joy. We sat there listening to our sisters in Christ singing praise songs to Jesosy and watching the gap between our worlds disappear. It was such a beautiful sweet time sitting there and then sharing a meal with them, and it was a very yummy meal as well.
At one point Naina, one of the ladies, said that when she was younger she had prayed that God would let her meet people from around the world and as she had come to know Christ she realized that we were all the same as Children of God, and tonight, sitting with all of us, she could see that that was true.
It was a wonderful preparation of my heart for this trip. In my mental preparation for sleeping in a tent, not showering, and having battles to the death with nasty bugs I hadn’t given much thought to the glory of what I was getting to go do. Naina’s statement pushed my thoughts to something greater than my discomfort, pushed them up to the fact that I am going to fellowship with faithful believers as Tessa shares stories with them and they help her tell the stories in their dialect so that the stories of the Bible can be shared with more and more people. I am getting to help out in a school for the village kids. I am getting to taste, in a very very very small way the beauty and glory of the promise found in Revelation 7:9, that one day “a great multitude...from all tribes and people’s and languages” will worship together before the throne!
So keep us in your prayers as we travel up with a pastor friend of ours, as we are there, that God would be mightily glorified in our time there, and as we head home for my and Hannah’s last few days in Tulear.
