We were told that we would be going to a village to meet with young girls, anywhere from 7 to 20-something years old, to talk with them about sex education. You see, most of them have HIV or AIDS. Many have children as soon as they are able to reproduce because that’s all a woman is good for in that culture, or so they think. In the village your worth is in giving a man babies. Your worth is in the sexual attention you give to the guys around you. With your luck they will marry you and provide for you and you’ll have a decent, accepted life.
Wrong.
They need to know there’s more.
We drove about an hour and a half outside of Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe. I sat in the back of the truck as we bounced up an down from the many potholes and dips that lined the dirt roads. Fields for as far as the eye can see. Women walk along the side of the road with either buckets of water or food on their head, or with huge bundles of logs over their shoulders. We passed by disheveled huts, rusted metal and littered trash along they way.
When we arrived in the village I saw a mass of girls standing in the center field. As I climbed out of the back of the truck with the rest of my team I began to hug a girl or two that came up to me. Hugs must be a very American thing. Especially a big, rock-back-and-forth “Hi! So nice to meet you!” hug. All of a sudden I had just about every single of the 70 girls lined up to get a hug from me. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself.
We congregated over to the middle of the field where they all sat. My teammate Molly talked to them about why God made women and spoke a little about Adam and Eve. She talked about our supporting role for men and the importance to save yourself until marriage. She also talked a little about the story of Martha and Mary when Martha was hard at work and Mary was resting at Jesus’ feet.
Then Caleb spoke from a man’s perspective. He told them about how God sees them and their worth. Caleb is an amazing example of a man of God and the girls got to see that first-hand from his encouragement to them.
Then I was up.
I talked to them about the book of Esther. How like many of them, she was an orphan from a village and not well known by the world. BUT Esther was chosen to be Queen of Persia. In Ephesians 3:20 it says how God wants to give us more than we could ever ask, think or imagine. If Esther would have just kept to her own plans and asked God to bless that, then she would have never been queen! She couldn’t have dreamt that royalty could ever be a possible reality. But that’s what happens when we make Jesus the Lord of our life where He is at the center of every decision and every plan we make. There’s not a doubt that many of those girls believed in Jesus. Heck I grew up my entire life truly believing and knowing what He did for me on the cross. But there’s a difference between knowing and having faith. You can see a chair and believe it’s a chair, but until you sit in the chair, you’re not actually trusting that it will hold you up.
So what was I getting at here? In 1 Corinthians 7:34 Paul writes that “An unmarried woman is concerned about Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord both in body and spirit.”
God’s purpose for singleness is for us to get to know Him, fall in love with Him and follow His will for our lives. It’s honestly that simple. But when we find our worth in the guys around us and their acceptance then we are tossed to and fro like the waves in the wind.
I told them how to find their identity in Christ. How He loves us so much that as His daugther’s in Christ we are actually royalty, just like Esther. We are princesses in the spiritual realm and hold all the power and authority of our Dad, the One True King, up in heaven. When we accept Jesus as our Lord and savior, when we surrender to His will, to His plan, to His life for us then we have the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us. We are His temple. In the Holy Spirit we have the authority to tell the devil NO. He knows our weaknesses. He knows how we long and crave for connection, a longing that the Lord blessed us with. And so the Enemy will dress in sheep’s clothes. In the form of that guy your dating and wants to take things a little further. In the form of “I love you” from the one who would only say it after you slept with him. In the rejection of the one that you thought you had a future with.
But our worth, our value comes from something so much more precious. Love is patient, love does not keep records of wrong-doings. Love is God and God is love. So why then do we find our worth and love in those around us when God is telling you that you are enough?
“So daughters,” I said to the 70 young girls.
So princesses.
If you have never fully accepted Christ into your heart, if you’ve never declared that for yourself then now’s the time. I asked them to close their eyes and if they wanted to accept Jesus into their hearts for the rest of their lives to raise their hand.
Slowly but surely, every last hand in the crowd was in the air.
“Open your eyes,” I said. They looked around and saw that the girl to the left and to the right of them had their hand raised too.
For those that could read English, we handed out about 20 Bibles for them to have of their own. They wrote their names in it and I had them circle the book of Esther, Ruth and John to start. The Bible can be pretty overwhelming if you don’t know where to start.
The girls burst into song and dance shortly after. As they sang I noticed that they would put their hands over their breasts, over their lady part and over the bottom. We were told that the song says “you can’t touch me here, you can’t touch me here, you can’t touch me here.”
That was the reality of their world. That they have a song to fend off the guys who constantly try to grope and play at them with inappropriate touches.
It broke my heart. I couldn’t tell you how many of these girls, even younger than me, dealt with an STD because men have made them think that their only worth is in giving their body away.
But it was a day to rejoice because I had 70 new sisters in Christ. Many with Bibles to continue their journey with God and with a new fire to guard their hearts and bodies like the precious temples they are.
It was an experience I’ll never forget, the 70 girls in an African village.
