Psalm 27:13-14
“I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
It’s in these times of crisis that God truly gives us a grace to enjoy the silver linings, as we become a little more aware of the ways He is and has been looking after us, even in the midst of pressing circumstances.
One of the most important things Judea Harvest has the pleasure of doing is planting their SNAP churches across South Africa, in that it gives Judea the opportunity to build houses of worship for communities that are in need of a new building or have never even had a building to begin with.
And while Judea has always known that there was something sacred about these buildings, it was not until this lockdown that we truly began to see how much God was capable of doing with them.
SNAP churches like the one in the village of Naluwe have now become more than just a church, as they serve as a center for food collection and food distribution for those struggling to feed their families.
And while the COVID-19 lockdown has slowed down construction of a few of our SNAP churches, we are amazed with God’s divine timing as several of our churches were finished just before the lockdown was put in place.
Marble Hall’s Jehovah El Roi ministries’ church was opened in February, just a month before the coronavirus pandemic began to take its toll. In fact, if it weren’t for the way the Marble Hall community rallied together to build this church, the building may not have been opened before the pandemic, therefore preventing it from serving as a food distribution center for families struggling to provide meals due to the lockdown.
At the time, we had no idea how significant the timing of these openings would be. Sure, opening the doors of any building sooner rather than later is always beneficial, but little did we know just how much of a difference it would make.
Thus, let us be reminded of the very meaning behind Jehovah El Roi: that our God is a God who sees us. He sees things we cannot see, He sees what we need in the present, He sees what we need in the future and He prepares a way for us in advance.
There is no way we as an organization, we as a nation or even we as a world could have predicted the events that have severely altered our ways of life in the past few months. Truth be told, that is a scary fact for most of us to swallow as many of us realize just how out of control the things in this world actually are.
But as we at Judea Harvest reflect back on what this situation would have looked like if it weren’t for the timing of these openings, we feel encouraged amid the chaos. We feel encouraged knowing that our God doesn’t just see the future, but He sees what we will need and provides for those needs before we even realize what it is we need. We feel encouraged knowing that He is a God who doesn’t just see the future, but is a God who sees us even amid the chaos.
Our prayer for you during this time of uncertainty is that you would feel seen by our God. We pray that all the wondering and worrying about what the next few months will look like would be overshadowed by the confidence our God brings us, as we trust that He has made a way long before we ever saw this coming. And we believe that even in the waiting, his timing is all divine and all perfect, for He sees the things that we cannot see.
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