God IS good

come taste and see

“We know that in everything God works for the good of those who love Him.” Romans 8: 28

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© 2013 by Hammie & Alti van Zyl. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 02/23/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4653-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8261-6 (e)

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Contents

1: Taste and See

2: God Is GOOD

3: Is It Worth It?

4: I Am Not Alone

5: Much-Afraid Went to War

6: There Will Always Be Another Mountain

7: In the Midst of the Storm

8: Through the Storm

9: You Are Important to God

10: Who Will Roll the Stone Away?

11: God Will Open the Door

12: He Is Our Healer

13: Under the Shelter of His Wings

14: Buying without Money

15: Everything That I Need

16: Supernatural Connections

17: Running with Horses

Dedication

•   The Benjamin Generation (especially to Nkosinathi, Lee, Ayabukwa, Solomzi, Mbulelo, Desmond, Putang, Valdo, Thabo, Nikho, Zizi, Sinesipho, Nomvano, Zonke and Mihle)

•   Our three godsons: Rudolf Visser, Joshua Heyns and Simeon Heyns

•   The persecuted church and the suffering bride of Christ

Even in the midst of all your trials, taste and see, God is good!

Foreword

By Paul Hattaway

(Author of The Heavenly Man)

Hammie and Alti van Zyl are a God-fearing couple

who like to share encouragement and testimonies from their own walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me” (John 10: 27), and the Apostle Paul taught that “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God” (Romans 8: 14).

In this book, you will read the words of a couple who are not religious people. Their Christianity is not dead formalism but a vibrant and real relationship with their Creator. This intimate relationship with God is what motivates Hammie and Alti to serve in non-Christian areas of the world. There the only local believers are small numbers of scattered disciples who often endure persecution. In that furnace of difficulty, Hammie and Alti have enjoyed rich fellowship with God’s people.

May you be blessed and encouraged in your faith as you read this precious book. My prayer is that you and I may pause and consider our own relationship with the Living God and make a fresh commitment to know and serve Him more wholeheartedly!

Paul Hattaway

Paul Hattaway is the author of The Heavenly Man and many other books about the church in Asia. He is also the director of Asia Harvest. For more information, visit www.asiaharvest.org

1: Taste and See

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

—Psalm 34: 8 (NIV)

I (Alti) always knew about God, but I only met Him in 1991. Let me take you back to December of that year as written in my journal:

“Come with us to Mozambique,” the young man says just before he leaves my office. “I will come around tomorrow for your answer.” For a long time, I stare at the closed door after he left, daydreaming about a safari in Africa. After a while, I pick up the phone and let him know I want to join them. I don’t ask any more questions; he doesn’t give any more information. I am on my way to my first African expedition… .

“Can you please help me with my luggage?” I ask one of the people standing near the bus leaving for Mozambique. “Which bag is yours?” he asks while looking at my hand luggage. I open the boot of the car and say, “All of these,” indicating my huge suitcase and another big bag. “Are you moving to Mozambique?” he asks with a confused expression on his face. I just ignore his question and start to hand him my luggage. I hear him groan as he picks it up. When we reach the bus, I see the other young people, each carrying only one small piece of luggage.

Before the bus leaves, everyone stands in a circle singing a Christian song and praying for the journey. Surprised, I think how spiritual they are. I look at the time ahead in disappointment and wonder if I made a mistake in coming along.

The last couple of hours since entering Mozambique, we have driven very slowly. The road is full of potholes. The signs of war are evident everywhere. We pass a huge truck still burning after being struck by a bomb just before we arrived; many houses are burnt down. A Shangaan woman sits next to the road with empty eyes. She grips the little plastic bag containing all her earthly belongings tightly. For the first time in my life, I see poverty, hopelessness, and the devastation of war. I feel sick and am shocked to see the horror around me.

Arriving at our destination, I wrote:

I am sharing a place with many other girls. They are all friendly, but they walk around with the Bible and talk about God as if He is their friend. One girl shows me my spot. I must sleep on the floor. Can you believe that? I put my luggage down and realize it fills the whole place. On my way out, I see a big spider on the roof of one of the tents. I don’t want to be here. I don’t like camping. I want electricity to dry my hair and to iron all my fancy clothes, which look totally out of place in this poor country. The romance of an African safari is gone. I am on a mission’s outreach, and for me, it will be a very long ten days!

My journal entry continues:

This is our first night in Mozambique. We have just finished our evening meal and are getting ready for more praying and singing stuff. I will wait until they start and then just disappear and go to bed.

Suddenly the whole sky lights up with bullets flying through the air. Someone yells at us: “Quickly, lie flat on the ground; the two local political parties start to fight again.” Our tents are pitched in the centre of the fighting area. We all lie on the ground and try not to draw any attention to us. The sand is still hot from the heat of the day. I am shivering with fear. My tears mix with the earth, leaving mud marks everywhere on my terrified face. For the first time in my life I know I am lost, and if any of these bullets hit me tonight, I will surely go to hell.

I crawl to a lady close to me. Calmly, she is praying for the people of Mozambique. Surprised, I ask her, “Why are you not afraid to die?” She tells me she knows Jesus and is ready to go to Him. He is the only way to eternal salvation. I want that peace in the middle of a war. Yes, I want that. I start to repent of my sins and accept Jesus as my Saviour and Prince of Peace… .

That night in Mozambique, with the sound of war in my ears, I made a choice to follow Jesus, the Son of God. After the fighting stopped that night, a new me stood up out of the dust. I enjoyed the outreach tremendously and felt as if I had discovered a great treasure. Suddenly, our primitive living conditions, the humid African heat, the lack of water, the language problems, and anything else that was upsetting me before that night became dim in the light of my Prince of Peace. My focus changed, and with that, contentment and joy filled me. I fell in love with Jesus Christ and wanted to spend as much time with Him as possible.

On that outreach, I tasted that God is good. I tasted and saw that He is my shelter in the middle of the war, that He is my shadow in the unbearable heat, that He is my Living Water in the drought, that He is the Saviour and the only hope for a country in despair! Little did I know that this outreach was only the beginning of my preparation for the years of being a missionary in war-torn countries.

At more or less the same time I invited Jesus into my life, another story began to unfold, about a man I didn’t know at that stage, but who would become my husband many years later.

I (Hammie) can relive that incident in 1990 as if it happened yesterday:

The aeroplane door opens. I look out into the vast empty space underneath me. My heart is racing. Three, two, one, jump! I jump out of the aeroplane. Gravity sucks me in, and I free-fall to earth. Freedom! Exhilarating! I have never felt more alive. I keep on falling down and down. I am counting: “One thousand and one, one thousand and two… one thousand and five.” My parachute has to be opened by this time. I look up and see only a bundle fluttering in the wind. Something is wrong; my parachute did not open completely. I pull the steering line; nothing happens. “Come on!” I shout. I pull again. Why doesn’t it open? Something is stuck and my parachute does not want to open. I keep on falling. I pull down on the steering line over and over again; still nothing happens. I keep on falling. “Lord, help me!” I cry out. I pull the steering line again. Nothing happens. I keep on falling down and down. If my parachute doesn’t open soon, I will fall to my death. I keep on pulling. “Lord, help!” In panic, I call out to God. I keep on falling… I pull again at the steering line and suddenly, only metres from the ground, the parachute opens, just in time to slow the fall and save my life. I reach the ground hard, but safely. For a long time I just lie there, too shaken to move, stunned by the nightmare I just experienced. “Thank you, Lord, that you saved my life,” I pray while my heart is still beating wildly in my chest. “Hammie,” I hear God’s voice in my heart. “You nearly died because your parachute was not folded according to the book. Life can be as exciting as parachuting, but if you keep on living your life out of accordance with My Book, you will fall to your death.” At that moment, with the parachute still next to me on the ground, my life changed. I started to live my life by His Book, the Bible, my compass for life.

This was how our journeys with God started. Since that Mozambique outreach, I (Alti) like to hear other people’s stories of how they changed their eternal address and moved from the kingdom of darkness into His wonderful Kingdom of Light. One of these stories stayed with me over the years.

Many years after I met my Prince of Peace, Hammie and I started to work among a tribe who had never heard about Jesus. When we asked them if they knew Jesus, they often replied, “I don’t know Him; maybe He lives in the next village.” We heard of a man who was the only Christian in a community that worshipped a false god. We invited him to come and fellowship with us. If the fanatics in his village caught him with us, it would have cost him his life, but his hunger for fellowship made him take the risk. I wrote the following in my journal:

He knocks softly on the door of our secret meeting place. He enters the room; fear is evident on his face. He is trembling. He doesn’t know us; we could be spies for the fanatics and intent on handing him over to them. But still he decided to come. I look at him and recognize my Jesus in his eyes. “How can you keep on standing in your faith when you are all alone and have no one to fellowship with?” we whisper. He starts to relax. He puts down his cup of tea and tells us his story:

“For years a man in white appeared to me in my dreams. Some nights He gave me advice on how to run my business. Some nights He taught me how to treat my family. Other nights He just sat and talked with me. I looked forward to going to bed because I never knew when He would appear again in my dreams. I didn’t know this man, and He never told me His name, but I fell in love with Him. It went on for many years. One day a missionary passed through our town. He had a children’s Bible, and I asked to look through it. Then suddenly, I saw in the children’s Bible a picture of this man who appeared to me in my dreams. Excited, I asked the missionary, ‘Who is this man in your book? I have loved this man for years.’ He told me, ‘This is Jesus.’ My friend from my dreams got a name: Jesus. I started to follow Jesus, and He introduced me to the Father. After that, Jesus kept on visiting me; together we fellowship.”

He stops; his eyes shine like the morning sun. We all sit in silence, aware of a Higher Presence in the room. With tears streaming down his face, he continues, “If you have tasted His presence, nothing else ever satisfies you again.”

In the next chapters, we want to share with you this incredible journey that our amazing God has taken us on.

2: God Is GOOD

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

—Psalm 34: 8 (NIV)

In the summer of 1994 I wrote the following in my journal:

The puppeteers are busy getting ready behind the closed curtain. I look at the faces of the excited Middle Eastern children. This will be these children’s first puppet (hand doll) show. It is the summer holiday in the Middle East, and we plan to explain the gospel with a series of puppet shows in a country where very few people follow Jesus.

We teach the children the song “God Is So Good” in their local language. As we sing, I see many hostile men with guns enter the courtyard and surround us. Immediately I know something is wrong. There is an unsettledness among the children. When we finish the song, it is as if these men are convinced that we are busy teaching “Christian propaganda”, and they shout at the kids, “Get away from these foreigners!” With force, they chase the children out, throw stones at us, and break up the meeting. Chaos breaks loose. Kids are pushing each other to get out the gate. The few adults who came to see the show are running home for safety. In vain we try to stop the havoc. I look up into the eyes of one of these men and see hate written all over his face. He picks up a big stone. My body aches where the stone has hit me. More stones follow. I run to my rented house behind the high walls for shelter. I heave a sigh of relief when I close the big black gate at my house. I am safe for now, but the rhythm of my pounding heart is calling out to my Heavenly Father: “Why didn’t You intervene? Why didn’t You help us?”

A couple of days after that incident at the puppet

show, I heard children outside our big black gate. Curious, I opened the gate; children were sitting everywhere on the pavement. I recognized them as the kids who had come to the puppet show. When

they saw me, they all started to sing “God Is So Good”. At that moment, I realized that those men may have stopped our meeting, but they couldn’t stop our message: God is good; He is so good to me.

That was not the end of the puppet shows. We were not able to have any more public meetings, but the local television station asked us to record our puppet shows, and they broadcasted them on a local television channel. Our puppet shows were one of the few children’s programmes on television at that time. Every time they aired it, many children in a country where evangelism is strictly forbidden watched and learned about Jesus and salvation. God is good; He is so good to me.

This reminded me of another story I heard of a man who was speaking at a big seminar about God. He claimed that God does not exist, and after his talk, he answered questions from the audience. An old man, who had been the town drunk for many years before he met Jesus and was healed, walked up from the back of the room peeling an orange. He went on to the stage and started to eat his orange. The speaker became irritated with this man and asked him what question he wanted to ask. The old man kept on eating the orange. The whole hall waited quietly in anticipation. Then, after the man finished the orange, he asked the speaker, “This orange I ate, was it sweet or sour?” “How would I know?” the speaker answered. “I did not taste it.” “Exactly,” the old man responded. “If you have never tasted God, how would you know if He is real?” If we really tasted the presence of God, we can’t have enough of Him.

However, after many of us became Christian, we still keep on believing that God is not always good to us. We frequently blame Him for things that go wrong in our lives. With our heads, we say that God is good, but in our hearts, we don’t really believe it. Sometimes we even think that God is cruel (How could He allow that Christian lady to be raped?) or we think He is absent and doesn’t care about us (Why doesn’t He heal me?). If we want to blame someone, we must blame Adam, who caused us to live in a fallen world. We have to search deep inside our hearts and uproot all the wrong thoughts about God in order to really experience true fellowship and union with Him. The “God” we so often worship is not the true, loving Father we have. Many times we blame God for things that go wrong, we don’t trust Him, we don’t know His love for us, and we are afraid of Him. God our Father is love, He is good, and His plans for us are good.

The good news is that when bad things happen to us, God can still make them work out for our good. That is the promise of Romans 8: 28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (NIV). Something which is not God’s will may happen to me, but God can use it in His plan for my life. When I was a small girl, an employee of my parents molested me. Nobody knew about it, and that man forced me to keep it a secret. For years I kept quiet and believed that it happened to me because I was a bad person. What happened to me as a girl was not God’s will, but my loving Father has used it in His plan for my life. God has helped me work through that bad experience, healed me, and changed the situation for good. Today I can help sexually molested children to heal emotionally. God used my past as the fuel for my present flame. God is so good. God is not our enemy. He is for us, He is in love with us, and He wants the best for us!

In Cape Town, Hammie and I run three foster homes. A couple of days ago, a girl in one of our foster homes who was raped before she was placed with us prayed: “Thank you, Lord, that I was raped, because if it didn’t happen to me, I would never have been brought to live with Mama Alti.” Every bad situation will work out for good for those who love God according to Romans 8: 28. God promised in Jeremiah 29: 11: “‘I know what I am planning for you,’ says the LORD. ‘I have good plans for you, not plans to hurt you’” (NCV). God doesn’t want to hurt us. He wants the best for us. He loves us. The more we understand He is good, the less we will ask Him why things happen to us.

In the next few chapters, as we share our walk with God, you’ll see that sometimes God came through in miraculous ways in our lives because He is good. At other times, He worked in normal ways according to the laws of nature because He is good. Many times we felt as if He didn’t come through for us at all, but even in those cases, we could not say He was not good anymore. He always stays the same: He is good, and His love endures forever.

We made a choice to believe that God is good, despite the outcome. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered the king when he wanted to throw them in the furnace in Daniel 3: 18: “Even if God does not save us, we want you, O king, to know this: We will not serve your gods” (NCV).

Even if God does not do what we want Him to do, He is still good, and His love endures forever.

3: Is It Worth It?

If you yourself don’t go with us,

then don’t send us away from this place.

—Exodus 33: 15 (NCV)

My journal entry of June 1992:

I am sitting at the Love Europe conference in Nuremberg, Germany. Last night I had a very uncomfortable and cold sleep on the cement floor of the hall I share with hundreds of young people attending the Love Europe missions’ conference. I am so thankful that God did not

call me to be a full-time missionary, because I like my luxurious lifestyle, my financial independence, and my career as a social worker. Yes, God knows that I am not the missionary type. I am not a pioneer who can leave everyone and everything that is important to me behind and just disappear into the unknown on my own. I will support missionaries financially, I will pray for missionaries. I will give out their newsletters, but thank you, Lord, that I don’t have to go myself!

That was what I thought!

But, today it is already twenty years since that day in Nuremberg, Germany. For the last twenty years, I have been a missionary. Did God force me to become a missionary? No. That same day in June 1992, His Spirit changed my will to align with His will, and in my heart, I became excited to follow a path that was unknown, but that would be filled with testimonies of His goodness and faithfulness in my life. If God asks you to do anything which you feel comes at too great a cost to be obedient, just let His Spirit make your will one with His will.

That day in June 1992, the speaker told us a story of an elderly missionary lady who worked in Africa. One day, she went to share her mission stories with a

group of schoolboys, but they were not interested and made fun of her. One boy asked her, “How much does

it cost to be a missionary?”, pointing and laughing at

her poor clothes. She answered, “My boy, for me, it costs everything. The last couple of years I have worked in Africa. In this time, the natives have attacked me several times. The last time they broke into my house and grabbed the manuscript of the book I am working on, the only copy I had, and threw it in the fire. When I saw my years and years of work burn, I called out, ‘Lord, is it worth it? Is it worth it?’ In response, I very clearly heard Him ask me, ‘Am I worth it? Am I worth it?’”

As I listened to this speaker, I wrote the following in my journal:

I can feel that something inside me has transformed. At first, I clearly said, “I don’t want to be a missionary.” After a while, I changed my mind to: “Maybe I can do it, Lord”. But suddenly, an urgent desire has welled up inside my heart, and my heart cries out, “Please, Lord, send me. I must go.” For the moment, it feels as if my heart betrays my head. Doubt and fear compete to rule my emotions. I ask, “But, Lord, who am I that You should choose me? I fear everything. I need my family and friends around me, and I enjoy my work as a social worker. I am not made of the same material as missionaries.”

When God called Moses at the burning bush, Moses asked God, “Who am I?” I felt like Moses that day in 1992. But after Moses saw the great I AM, he changed “Who am I?” to “Here I am.” That day I also said: “Here I am, Lord. Please send me!”

As I walked out of the large mission conference hall that day, many conflicting emotions see-sawed in my soul. The yes in my heart was growing, while the excuses in my head multiplied. Tears streamed down my face. With a dry mouth, I whispered, “Lord, do you know how I feel?” As I left the hall, someone placed a note in my hands. I opened it and read these words:

I saw your shoulders shaking;

I saw the tears on your hands.

It made Me remember the blood on My hands

And the pain in My body

And My forsakenness from God,

And it made Me tender inside

Seeing you,

A special trophy of My love.

The following months I had to learn in baby steps to trust God to provide for my every need, to help me, and to lead me. I had to learn to depend on Him alone. Many people told me I was making a big mistake in resigning from my job. Some said it was strange that so many young people who wanted to see the world expected the church to pay for their trips. The missionary Jim Elliot’s words carried me through many times of doubt. He said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Today, twenty years later, I can look back and say from my own experience: taste and see that God is good. If you really want to know if God is trustworthy and faithful, come to a place where He is your only source, because He is the only source. No matter what crossroads you are standing at, God is there with you. You are not alone.

4: I Am Not Alone

Never will I leave you;

never will I forsake you. —Hebrews 13: 5 (NIV)

After I felt the Lord’s calling to serve Him full-time, I spent 1993 in training with Operation Mobilisation. Then, God invited me to go with Him to northern Iraq to work among the Kurdish people. At that time, Iraq was known as a “red-zone country”, or a cemetery for missionaries, meaning that the conflict and living conditions made it one of the most dangerous places in which to live. Before I left for Iraq, I asked myself many “what if” questions: What if they kidnap me? What if I die there? What if I don’t make it? The more I thought about Iraq, the more afraid I became to go. I started to imagine the worst situations. Here is my journal entry from 7 January 1994:

Bravely, but very afraid, I greet my family and board the aeroplane on my way to Iraq. Through the aeroplane window, I see Cape Town growing smaller and smaller, and I know there are two years lying between me and my family and friends. I start to cry and pray: “Lord, where are You? I feel so alone and afraid.” Immediately, I feel Him answer me: “Alti, look around you. The plane is full and the only open seat is next to you. I reserved it for Me. I am next to you. I will never leave you.” As I look around, I see that it is true. Every seat is taken but the one next to me, which is empty in the eyes of those around me but taken by the King of my heart. Great peace enters my soul, and with excitement, I fly into my new future.

Since that day on the aeroplane, I have known that God is always with me, but so often my heart anxiously looks for fresh evidence of His presence. Sometimes during my journey with God, He knows that I need Him to show Himself in a special way to me, like the time He called us (Hammie, Alti and Beth) to hike to a tribe living high in the Himalaya Mountains. They had never heard about Jesus, as according to the locals, no one wanted to go there because the hike is so difficult.

I woke up in the middle of the night in our tent at the foot of the Himalayas. It was pitch dark. The physical darkness enhanced the spiritual darkness. It felt as if the darkness suffocated me. I thought of the leeches that crawled outside our tent, looking for a hole through which to enter, and a shiver went through my body. I listened to the sounds of the night. Even that was spine chilling; it reminded me of something out of a horror movie. Instinctively, my hand reached for the flashlight next to me.

Before I could switch it on, a beautiful golden glow filled our tent. None of our flashlights were on, so I thought the light came from our friend Beth’s tent next to us, who had her light on. I stared at this wonderful glow in awe, and I fell asleep peacefully, thinking that Beth would be sorry if her batteries didn’t last for the whole hike.

But Beth also saw the golden glow that night. The next day, we discovered that neither she nor us had had a flashlight on or had any other form of illumination during the night. In that overwhelming darkness, God had sent a golden glow into our tents to tell us, “I am with you. My presence goes with you.” In the presence of His light, the darkness must flee.

God knows about you. You are not alone. Even when all your friends and family seem to have forgotten about you, He never forgets you. Your name is written on the palms of His hands. A couple of years ago, we started to work in Cape Town. One morning, we separately asked God where we must go that

day. Both of us heard “Moffat Street”. We took out

the map book and looked for Moffat Street. We

went to Moffat Street and walked around, asking God which house in that street was in His heart.

God showed us a specific house. We went to that door and knocked. Nobody answered. We knocked again. Slowly, an old man opened the door. We told him, “God send us to this house today. Can we

please come in for a while?” The old man started to

cry and told us his story. “Today is my eightieth birthday and all my children have forgotten about

me. I am so lonely. This morning I asked God if He still knows about me. He sent you, and now I know

He does care.” We celebrated the lonely man’s birthday with a cake and spent a wonderful time

with him. Jesus sent us to be His body in that

house that day. You are not alone. God knows about you.

During my time in Iraq, I got very sick, and in the seventeen years since then, I (Alti) have struggled with my health. In 2010, I had a major operation in which the doctors removed tumours from my body.

I opened my eyes after the operation, and my first

words were: “Pain. I’ve got too much pain.” I

immediately dozed off again, still groaning from the tremendous pain in my weak body. In that half-awake state, I saw a vision of Jesus hanging on the cross next to my bed. His bruised body was full of bleeding wounds. His blood dripped on me and ran down my face, saturating my whole being. It felt so real that

I tried to wipe His blood from me. I looked into His

eyes and felt His love for me. My pain and His pain became one. During this vision, I heard Him repeat to me, “I love you. I know the way. I will carry you through this. I love you. I know the way. I will carry you through this.”

Jesus understands our pain, our loneliness, our struggles, and our hardships. He is always with us. We are not alone. Today, as you go through your difficult situation, He says to you, “I love you. I know the way. I will carry you through this!”

5: Much-Afraid Went to War

The Lord is my helper;

I will not be afraid.

—Hebrews 13: 6 (NIV)

Quickly, I (Alti) discovered that courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to press on in spite of fear. Knowing God is with me does not take away my fear; it just makes me willing to go on in spite of the fear.

Often someone says to me, “I could not do what you are doing. God made you brave.” But that is not true. I am not brave. In reality, I am one of the most fearful people I know.

I was young and single when I left for Iraq nearly two decades ago. I was eager for the challenge, but my lifelong fear buddies didn’t stay home when I left. My plane landed in Turkey, and I took a bus all the way to Iraq. The closer I got to the Iraqi border, the more fearful I became. But when living in Iraq, there was no room for fear; I needed to survive; I needed to cope. I was far from my family and felt very isolated (because in those days, there were no telephones nor internet or other form of communication with the outside world in the country). In the beginning, I was awoken nearly every night by the sounds of bombs and fighting in and around our town. Some nights, however, I was strangely very calm. I just got up and went to the safe room and prayed when the fighting started. But other nights, I was terrified. I couldn’t move. Some nights the soldiers who attacked the Kurds where I was living didn’t shoot; they just lit fires on top of the mountains which surrounded our town. They didn’t do anything more, but those nights, the battle was in my mind. I knew they were all around us and that there was no way to escape.

The threat to our lives in Iraq increased. Some country leaders offered large sums of money for every head of a foreigner brought to them. Therefore, the United Nations demanded that we get more bodyguards. One day, when I was on my way to visit my language teacher with my two bodyguards, a minibus full of soldiers suddenly stopped, and the soldiers surrounded me. I stood with my back pressed against the wall of the alley and stared at the ground out of fear that eye contact would provoke the soldiers to shoot me. My bodyguards talked with them in Kurdish, begging them to leave me alone. After some time, the soldiers climbed back into the minibus and drove away.

Another time, after a short visit to South Africa, I flew back to Istanbul, Turkey, and from there took a bus to the Iraqi border. If I close my eyes, I can play back in my mind what happened as if I’m watching a movie:

Tired after a twenty-five hour journey, I get off the crowded bus. It is very hot outside. I look up and down the deserted street of the border town and am surprised. Usually this street is buzzing with activity, but today I see only torn plastic bags flutter in the wind and hear only an abnormal quietness, as if everyone is hiding somewhere. I walk to the only taxi parked in the street and wake up the sleeping driver to take me to the Iraqi town where I live.

Usually the taxi drivers are friendly and try to make small talk, but today my driver is obviously stressed; he even looks afraid. I sit back in the dirty seat, look through the window at the country I love, and think it is nice to be back in Iraq. Halfway to my town, out of the blue, he stops the taxi and opens the door. He throws my luggage out of the car. “Get out!” he shouts. Not knowing what is going on, I reluctantly climb out. He speeds away, covering me in white dust. I struggle to drag my luggage, full of material for my school, out of the road. “What now?” I wonder. I cannot walk the five kilometres home; my luggage is too heavy for me to carry. I decide to wait for another taxi. Usually many taxis travel this road, but today not a single car goes by.

Then I hear the sound of thunder. It does not come from the sky but from an enormous cloud of dust in the direction of the border. An army with tanks (36 000 of them) are on their way to attack Iraq, and I am standing alone in their way, a target for them to shoot, kill, or do whatever else they want to do with

a foreigner who helps their enemy. I grab

some of my bags and try to run. The next moment, a private car comes out of nowhere and stops next to me. Without asking, I just jump in. My luggage fills the back seat. I have no idea who this person is. I don’t know if he is part of the attack. Instinct just let me jump in his car. He protests and commands me to get out. I open my wallet and show him dollars. The sound of the tanks is coming closer. He knows that this is a life-or-death moment for me. He starts the car and drives hopelessly too fast on the bad road, but he delivers me safely to my house.

After that incident, the fighting continued at night. Some nights I wasn’t afraid, but fear became more and more of a stronghold in my life.

Then it happened that everyone in our small team needed to leave for a couple of days, but I, who had just returned, was not able to leave again. I stayed, alone. That night I went to sleep on the flat roof of our house as I did every other night because the temperature inside was between 50 and 60 degrees Celsius (about 131 degrees Fahrenheit). I felt lonely and afraid, but I eventually fell asleep only to wake up again to the sound of mortars, bombs, and gunfire in our neighbourhood. I ran to the safe room inside but didn’t feel any more secure. I sat on the big grey chair, too afraid to cry, too afraid to pray, too afraid to breathe. The fighting went on until daybreak. My fear intensified, and it established dominion over my life.

But through all these incidents, I knew God was with me. That thought made me stay in Iraq, but it didn’t take away my fear. I felt so guilty that in spite of all the testimonies I had of God’s presence, I still felt so fearful. Then God took away this burden by leading me to Judges 6 in the NCV. The Lord sent Gideon to rescue the Israelites out of the hands of the Midianites:

An angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon and told him, “Go… I am the one who is sending you” (verse 14). How often we think that if only an angel appeared to me, I would surely obey. But even after the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he answered, “Lord, how can I?” (verse 15). He gave God many excuses why he couldn’t go, but his main reason was fear.

In verse 16, God promised him, “I will be with you.” That was not enough for Gideon; he wanted more reassurance.

Gideon said, “‘If you are pleased with me, give me proof that it is really you talking with me. Please wait here until I come back to you. Let me bring my offering and set it in front of you.’ And the Lord said, ‘I will wait until you return’” (verses 17-18). Gideon went and prepared some meat and bread. At the request of the angel of the Lord, Gideon placed the meat and bread on a rock. The angel touched it, and fire jumped up from the rock and completely burned up the meat and the bread as Gideon watched. The next moment, the angel disappeared (verses 19-21). You would think that now Gideon would surely go without fear or doubt.

But Gideon was not convinced. He said to God in verse 37, “‘I will put some wool on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the wool but all of the ground is dry, then I will know that you will use me… as you said.’” The next morning the ground was dry but the wool was so wet that Gideon was able to squeeze a full bowl of water from it. Surely he would go to fight the Midianites now, but no.

He requested more proof from God in verse 39: “Let only the wool be dry while the ground around it gets wet with dew.” The next morning, the wool was dry and the ground around it was wet (verse 40). If you saw these miracles happen before your eyes, why would you still be afraid? But Gideon was still afraid.

Judges 7: 9-11 (NCV) continues the story: “That night the LORD said to Gideon, ‘Get up. Go down and attack the camp of the Midianites, because I will give them to you.

But if you are afraid to go down, take your servant Purah with you. When you come to

the camp of Midian, you will hear what they

are saying. Then you will not be afraid to

attack the camp.’” He went down and heard one of the Midianites tell his friend about his dream, and he heard the interpretation of it. Then, finally, Gideon believed that God would be with him, and he attacked and defeated the Midianites.

I could identify so much with Gideon’s story.

Sometimes I asked God to confirm something over

and over to me, and even then, I was still too afraid.

But if you keep on going in spite of fear, your

testimony will also be that of Gideon in Judges 8: 18 (NCV): “Gideon asked… , ‘What were the men

like that you killed on Mount Tabor?’ They answered, ‘They were like you. Each one of them looked

like a prince.’” The story of Gideon encouraged me

to acknowledge my fear but to go on in spite of my fear.

One day in Iraq we went to the border where Iraq,

Turkey, and Syria join to pray for these three countries.

I stood in Iraq and looked across the Tigris River at Syria, where some soldiers had gathered. As we prayed, I opened my eyes and saw one of the soldiers aim his rifle at me. My heart skipped a beat. I knew I must duck and hide behind the jeep, but fear froze me and I stayed on my feet, an easy target for him. The moment he pulled the trigger, a shining man in white appeared next to him and knocked his gun into the air. I felt the bullet fly just over my head instead of through my heart. The soldier missed me; the Shining Man in white saved my life. God was with me. He changed the direction of the bullet.

In Iraq during the summer of 1995, I became sick. I started a struggle with my health that has lasted for seventeen years. Many nights I fought to stay alive. That summer I was too weak to go upstairs to the flat roof to sleep, so I stayed inside the unbearably hot house. My housemates left their guitar next to me at night so I could make a noise on it if I needed their help. Often they didn’t wake up, and I struggled alone to the Middle Eastern hole-in-the-ground toilet, vomited, and then fainted from exhaustion. At one point I came to on the floor of the toilet with my face in a puddle of vomit. Fear was already so much a part of my life that it was normal for me to fear for my health. What would happen to me?

After my stay in Iraq, I went in 1997 to work with Afghan refugees on the border of Afghanistan. I only had a six-week visa, so every six weeks I had to leave to renew my visa in a neighbouring country. During one of these journeys, I stayed in a guest house in Kabul in Afghanistan. I was the only guest and totally alone in the house. This was during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, and fighting was everywhere. That night the fighting started again. I was alone in a strange city and became very afraid. I can still remember the smallest details of that night as written in my journal:

I wake up to the sound of shooting. “Where am I?” I wonder and rub my sleepy eyes to see better. The shooting comes closer. I pull the blanket over my head when a bomb explodes not very far from the guest house. The windows rattle; the sky lights up. More shooting. Quickly I get up, light the candle with shaking fingers, dress myself in my warm jacket and boots, and make haste downstairs to safety. In the big old dining room, I see a piano in the corner. It is covered with dust; the Taliban does not allow people to play music.

The shooting and bombing become more intense; mortars are flying through the air. I have to stay calm. I open the piano, and my fingers start to play my favourite song, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”. I keep on playing until His peace calms my fearful heart. Hours later, when dawn breaks, the shooting stops. I close the piano for the first time tonight. What a friend I have in Jesus, who carries me through my darkest night.

At another time, I went to India to extend my visa,

but India refused the extension. At that stage I

was helping to organize a prayer outreach in which prayer teams from countries over the world would come to pray for the Afghans. I had to return for that, but I had no visa. I felt God say that I should go back without a visa. My first reaction was, “Lord, this

is suicide!” Later I did obey, but I was paralysed

with fear the entire night before the flight. What if I ended up in prison for life? The next day I went to the airport, but I felt sick with fear the whole way. “Lord, please help me!” I cried out. I carefully journaled that incident:

Slowly I walk into the airport building. My fearful heart is beating in my ears; its panic messages echo through my soul. I go and stand in the queue to pass through customs. The next moment, a stranger takes me by the arm and says, “Let me help you through customs before the other people come through.” Together we walk up to the man behind the counter. The stranger gives the customs officer my passport and demands that he stamp it. The custom officer just obeys as if under a spell. He does not even look at my visa (which I don’t have). The kind stranger helps me through the rest of the customs checkpoints. Amazed, I look into his friendly eyes. He smiles at me and disappears.

With a grateful heart, I board the plane. After forty minutes in the air, we fly into the worst monsoon storm I have ever experienced. The aeroplane shakes wildly in all directions. I grab the armrest of my seat. Luggage falls out of the overhead compartments; coffee flies through the air; passengers scream. We go down and down and down. My intestines are in a knot; my heart is beating wildly; my stomach is in my throat. Surely the plane is going to crash. It seems as if the pilot has lost control of the plane. I am too afraid even to pray. The stress of not having a visa is catching up with me. I feel sick, as if I am going to faint out of fear… .

By the grace of God, we didn’t crash that night. I landed with wobbly legs and more fear than before leaving. Since that day I have been afraid to fly. The moment I enter into a plane, my hands start to sweat. While others are enjoying the journey, I fear that we will crash. I hear every change in the sound of the engine. All the time I think of what could happen in flight. I am overly sensitive for the smallest turbulence. The moment a plane takes off, my heart races and my mind tells me that this is the end.

When we miraculously landed that night, I still needed to go through customs without a visa. At that time the officials wrote down your visa number before they allowed you to enter the country. My journal entry continued:

I go to the back of the queue. I need time

to calm down before I reach the front. Since the plane landed, the same song repeats in

my head: “Nothing is too difficult for Thee, nothing is too difficult for Thee. O Lord God, Thou has made the heaven and the earth by Thy great power… nothing is too difficult for Thee.” The shorter the queue becomes the louder I sing.

Then it is my turn. I give my passport to the customs officer. He looks at it for some time. I stop breathing. “Where is your visa?” he asks. Irritation is written all over his face. “I don’t have a visa.” I try to answer as if it is the most normal thing to enter a country without a visa. With disbelief, he stares at me. “I will call the security police,” he says with a grin. It looks like he is enjoying my misery. I follow him with my eyes. On his way to call the police, his friend greets him and they start to talk. The friend looks at the South African passport in the officer’s hand, takes it, pages through it, and points in my direction. Both men come over to me.

In broken English, the friend asks me, “Do you know Johnty Rhodes, the famous South African cricket player?” I tell him that everyone in South Africa knows Johnty. He commands the customs officer to stamp my passport. “I need to talk to her about my hero, Johnty Rhodes,” he says. The customs officer does exactly what his friend asks. He completely forgets that he was on his way to call the police. The Johnty fan and I walk away together talking cricket, and as I walk away from customs I walk into the country without a visa, to do the work God called me to do.

That was a very nice testimony of how God is faithful and how He helped me, but fear had left its mark after those incidents. After my time with the Afghans, I came home and got married, but I had never worked through my fear.

After my marriage to Hammie, God called us to go to twelve unreached tribes in the Himalaya Mountains to plant churches and train the church leaders. We (who are no hikers) had to walk for days to reach some of these tribes. My health hadn’t recovered since my time in Iraq, so I was always tired and in a lot of pain. God asked us to visit two specific tribes in the Himalayas, and we had to walk for twenty-nine days to reach them. At that time I couldn’t get through a single day without immense discomfort. How would I walk in the difficult Himalayas for twenty-nine days? Night after night I woke up in panic. It was too much for me. God faithfully helped me through that whole trip, but fear kept me from enjoying life. These fears became part of my biology. Fear became my first reaction to whatever life puts in my path.

I realized I needed to break through these fears. Jesus did not come to give me a spirit of fear. I started to recognize all the fears in my life: fear of men, fear of rejection, fear of narrow spaces, fear of suffocating, fear of flying, fear of failing, fear of disappointing others, fear of dying, fear of losing someone, fear of going to unknown places, fear of not meeting deadlines, fear of speed, fear of water, fear that the worst would happen to me and fear of sickness. Then Jesus helped me to deal with my bondage of fear.

After that, I had to learn how to cope with stressful situations. In the next chapter, I will share how God helped me to keep on fighting fear and stress by teaching me some key lessons during our hike to K2 mountain.

6: There Will Always Be Another Mountain

For when I am weak,

then I am strong.

—2 Corinthians 12: 10 (NIV)

K2 is the second highest mountain in the world and part of the Himalaya range. In 2008 God called us to climb it to pray for the lost people of the Himalayas. My journal will take you back with me to that time:

The jeep comes to a halt at a pile of rocks that block the way. Thick dust covers the road. We just missed a rockslide. We are still a couple of kilometres away from where we will stay overnight and where the hike to K2 will start tomorrow. What now? Our guide answers my thoughts by saying, “We have to climb over this mountain to get to the other side. There is no other way.” I am looking at the mountain. There is no trail on the steep slope. The sand is very loose, and rocks are constantly falling from above. I look down at the strong icy river far beneath us and brace myself for what lies ahead.

We start the walk. The sand is loose and I slide as I walk, but every time, the thought of falling down to the river far down below in the valley makes me do an acrobatic move to regain my balance. I don’t look down, because then I feel afraid I will fall. I don’t look up, because then I feel discourage by the difficult climb ahead. I only look in front of me. After a couple of hours of a nail-biting climb, we reach our campsite for the night.

In our tent, I take off my socks and look at my burning red feet full of blisters. The hike to K2 hasn’t even started and already I cannot step normally. Since I became sick in Iraq, the skin on my feet has been very sensitive and most shoes hurt me, but tomorrow I have to start a twelve-day hike over very rocky terrain. I cannot see how I will be able to do this. I also feel so sick. I drink medicine for my pain and fever, roll open my mattress, and try to have an early night.

I am still lying awake in my tent in the middle of the night. In just a few hours, we will start our hike to K2 base camp at 5 150 metres above sea level, and I am very afraid of what lies ahead. “Lord, I have so much pain, and my feet give me so much trouble that I cannot even put on shoes. How will I make this hike?” The Lord starts to show me that I will always have “mountains” to climb in my life. Some “mountains” will be much higher and more difficult than K2, but there are some keys that His bride must use to help her over any “mountain” in her way. I get out my notebook and start to write down everything I feel God is telling me:

1)   Remember what I did for you in the past. Write it down, think about it, and tell others about it. In that way, you will remember My constant faithfulness and your faith will be strengthened. That was what David did when he faced Goliath. He remembered what he did to the bear and the lion and was willing to face the giant because he knew the same God who had helped him in the past would help him again.

2)   Hold on to My promises for your future. That makes you see the end more clearly than the problem in front of you.

3)   Focus on My greatness. I am bigger and more powerful than your “mountain”. Change the way you look at the “mountain”. The “mountain” is big, but I am much bigger. Stop looking at the problem and start focussing on the Problem Solver. Stop looking at the financial crisis and start focussing on the Source. Stop looking at the medical report and start focussing on the Healer.

4)   Praise and thank Me for the “mountains” you encounter. “Lord, why must I thank You for my financial crisis or my sickness?” I interrupt. Because in My Word, I promise that everything will work out for good for those who love Me, those who are called according to My purpose. As 1 Thessalonians 5: 18 says, “Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (NIV, emphasis added). “All circumstances” means both the good ones and the bad ones.

5)   Understand My power in you and live from this power. This is a supernatural power. It is available to you, and therefore you can say, “I can do all things through Christ, because he gives me strength” (Philippians 4: 13, NCV).

6)   Check your words. Are you speaking faith or fear? You must guard what you say.

“Thank you, Lord, for this mountain ahead of me.” With these words on my lips, my fear is leaving me, and I fall peacefully asleep.

I started the first day of that hike to K2 with these new keys fresh in my mind. As we walked for days over difficult mountains, slippery glaciers, and dangerous rivers, I could face the challenge because I practised the new keys I received.

I constantly checked my words. Joel 3: 10 (NKJV) teaches us that the weak must say, “I am strong.” It doesn’t say that the weak must talk about their weakness. I stopped complaining about my pain and struggle and instead started to proclaim His power in me. I could walk in victory because these keys taught my spirit to rule over my body. I started to live in His strength. That mountain became just another journey through which to experience more of His abundance. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength!

7: In the Midst of the Storm

You protect the helpless

when they are in danger.

You are like a shelter from storms.

—Isaiah 25: 4 (NCV)

For the last seventeen years, I (Alti) have struggled with my health, and even as I write, I am still in the midst of this storm. I am seldom without pain or fatigue. I don’t know why God does not heal me, but the fact He has not healed me does not mean He does not love me or wants to punish me. I have learnt that a healthy spirit is much more important than a healthy body. I can have a full life without perfect health.

My mother lives in Langebaan, on the west coast of South Africa. Langebaan is a very popular holiday destination by the sea. In August and September, it becomes one of the most beautiful towns in South Africa because colourful wild daisies bloom everywhere in the fields. It looks like one enormous garden. These daisies open their petals in the morning when the sun shines brightly and continue their amazing show of beauty and colour until the sun sets. They don’t open when the wind is too strong, they don’t open on cloudy days, and they don’t stay open during the night. They need just the right weather to display their beauty. Once, we drove to visit my mother on a sunny day. The daisies were breathtaking. Two days later, we returned home on the same road, but it was cloudy and rainy. All the daisies were closed, and we hardly saw any sign of their beauty. It was there, but we couldn’t see it.

“Don’t be a daisy Christian,” God said to me. I realized that many of us need the perfect conditions to bloom. As long as we are part of a wonderful fellowship

group, as long as our finances, health, or relationships go well, we eagerly bloom, but the moment the conditions change, we quickly close our petals and hide our faith from the world. It is easy to bloom when everything goes well. Everybody can do that. But only those who are planted on the Rock keep on blooming when circumstances change for the worse. Some people actually become more beautiful in difficult situations, and that becomes their most precious testimony.

What happens to you when your conditions change? Do you blame God for life’s storms? We can’t be fair-weather Christians. Our positive reaction to bad things is an advertisement that draws people to God. Everyone can praise God when life is going well, but when you go through stormy times and still praise God, then the world will listen to your testimony.

One day God told us to go to a specific address. We didn’t know the street or who lived at the house God led us to. We knocked. Nobody answered. We knocked again. A lady sitting in an office chair wheeled herself to the door and opened it. We told her that God had sent us to her and asked if we could come in. She started to cry and said, “I can hardly walk,” and she showed us her disabled legs. She continued, “The only way I can go somewhere is on my electric scooter, but it is broken. This morning I asked God to send someone to help me.” Immediately we replied, “How can we help you?” thinking that she needed our help to repair the scooter or to take her shopping, but she requested, “Please take me and my tea trolley to my sick friend.” We helped her into the car and placed the tea trolley in the boot, but we were still unsure what this was all about.

At her friend’s house, she asked us to unload the

tea trolley and help her into the kitchen. She could not walk on her own, so we took her by the arms

and helped her. We thought that maybe this was

her friend’s tea trolley and that she wanted to return

it. The next moment, she threw herself on top of the

tea trolley, and her legs dangled off the side. She kick-kicked at the ground to manoeuvre herself to her sick friend’s room and helped by washing, cooking, and caring for her friend. With tears in my eyes, I saw someone who looked away from her disability, soaring above the storms of her life, and served herself (literally on a tea-trolley) to someone in need. She didn’t want us to do the work. She laughed and pointed to herself on the tea trolley and said, “Isn’t God good?”

We left the house. As I closed the door, I heard her kick-kick through the house, while saying, “Thank you, Jesus; thank you, Jesus.”

This lady taught me that if you look in a mirror,

you’ll only see yourself, your pain, or your problems, but if you look through a window, you’ll look away

from yourself and will see the pain of others around you.

When the dark clouds of a storm are gathering in your life and the future looks bleak and hopeless, you must remember that Jesus will be there with you in the midst of the storm. I read that when Hurricane Ike struck several countries in

September 2008, it uprooted thousands of mighty oak and pine trees but no palm trees because according to the writer, the kind of palm tree that grows in the affected areas can bend their tops to the ground for up to five hours. After a storm, they just stand up again. God built a bounce-back mechanism in this tree. During a storm, this tree’s roots become stronger. Though your circumstances may knock you down, they will not knock you out, because God placed a bounce-back mechanism in your spirit as well. Every time we survive a storm, like the roots of the palm tree, we become stronger.

Peter got out of the boat to walk to Jesus on the water. But in Matthew 14: 30, we read: “When Peter saw the wind and the waves, he became afraid and began to sink” (NCV). We must fix our eyes on God—we must glue our eyes on the King of the whole universe and not look away from Him. In your storm, you might only see the wind and the waves around you at first, but if you look carefully, you will see Jesus walking on the water to your boat.

According to Matthew 14: 25, “Between three and six o’clock in the morning, Jesus came to them, walking on the water” (NCV). In my life, the storms have felt the worst in the middle of the night, but the darker your situation seems, the closer you must look, because Jesus will come to help you.

For years I (Alti) worked under the wonderful leadership of Francois and Karen Vosloo. They made such an impression on me. They quickened the pruning

process in my life and jump-started my mission

career. One time I was flying with Francois in his

private aeroplane. I was sitting in the co-pilot seat,

and under his watchful eyes he handed over the controls to me. For a while it felt wonderful flying the plane. Then we flew through a cloud and I could not see where we were going. “I cannot see! I cannot see!” I called for help. “Just look at the instruments in front of you. Then you can fly with ease through the cloud,” Francois calmly replied. I kept my eyes on

the instruments and piloted the aeroplane safely through the cloud.

God’s goodness and His promises are like those instruments. When the clouds of problems obscure your vision, fix your eyes on His goodness and His promises and you’ll see how easily and safely you can move through the clouds because “we live by what we believe, not by what we can see” (2 Corinthians 5: 7, NCV).

How can we keep on standing strong in the midst of the storm? Hosea 14: 5 says: “ . . . they will blossom like a lily. Like the cedar trees in Lebanon, their roots will be firm” (NCV). Even when we feel as weak as a lily that is easily tossed to and fro in the wind of adversity, we can be strong like the cedar of Lebanon as long as we are rooted in the Rock. When we are rooted in the Rock, then we don’t need good weather to blossom because we believe Romans 8: 37: “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (NKJV).

8: Through the Storm

He stilled the storm to a whisper

—Psalm 107: 29 (NIV)

My journal entry of 15 May 2007:

It is 4.15 in the morning. I, Alti, zip open our tent for the fourth time tonight. The snowy Himalaya Mountains are white in the moonlight. I breathe heavily on my way to the primitive “long drop” toilet. Since we arrived at the village of the Larke people, I have struggled with high altitude sickness as well as heavy diarrhoea. I have no strength to walk. I stop to rest. My eyes wander over the stone Larke houses, which have no windows. The houses look eerie in the moonlight. Every house has two storeys; the livestock live downstairs and the family live upstairs. Without Jesus, these people are all lost. I pray for them and thank God for the fruitful time we had the last couple of days.

Back at the tent, I hear that the others are also awake. It feels as if I haven’t slept at all, but now we have to start hiking. Today we have to start early because we need to cross the high Larke pass and get down before the end of the day. It will be a long day. I start to pack my bag, but I am too weak and sick and very often I have to rest. How will I survive this hike today?

With great effort we start walking. With every step I recite Isaiah 40: 31: “But the people who trust the Lord will become strong again… they will walk and not become tired” (NCV). After a while the altitude sickness takes its toll and I cannot go on. “Lord, help me!” I cry out to God. Suddenly, somebody with a white Tibetan horse passes me and asks if I want to ride. Grateful, I get on the horse’s back. The mountain trail is narrow and very slippery. I see the river flowing hundreds of metres beneath us. The horse slips and both of us nearly fall down the cliff. The horse slips again, but I feel too sick to care. I faint and nearly fall off the horse. Then the snow becomes too deep and I have to get off.

I have to walk again. Higher and higher we go up the Larke pass. Everyone breathes with great difficulty because of the lack of oxygen at this high altitude. It starts to snow, but my feverish body does not feel the cold.

I go on repeating Isaiah 40: 31: “But the people who trust the Lord will become strong again… they will walk and not become tired.” Over and over I repeat the Word of God, which carries me uphill, downhill, uphill, downhill.

At the top, a heavy snowstorm makes it impossible to see. I battle against the strong

icy wind which blows the snow against my

face. It hurts, like needles are cutting into my flesh. I am dizzy, blacking out and often slipping and falling in the snow. I hear avalanches around us. Many people have died on this pass. A week ago, eight porters died here in an avalanche.

But I push on, reciting, “But the people who trust the Lord will become strong again… they will walk and not become tired.” It carries me uphill, downhill, uphill, downhill.

After nearly sixteen hours of wrestling with death on the snowy trails, I decide to give up. This nightmare has no end. I cannot go on. The next moment the trail bends, and as I walk around the corner, there in front of me is the town we are heading for. Never give up; the end is closer than you think.

I (Hammie) cannot think of a time in my life when I struggled more than on that day crossing the Larke pass. I wrote in my journal:

It is early in the morning. As I place my heavy backpack on my back, I know I have a big problem. My body is just too weak and tired. The last nine days of hiking, I struggled with a bad flu. My chest aches from all the coughing; my muscles are burning. After climbing the first hill, I struggle to breathe but realize there is no other way. I have to go on, no matter how I feel. My body rebels, but my spirit presses on. At times I am so tired I don’t even have the strength to keep my eyes open. I walk with eyes closed, not caring whether or how far I will fall. I see how weak Alti is. “Lord, how will she make it through this day? Will I lose my wife today?” I cannot see how she will survive; I cannot see how I will survive. I feel so powerless to help her when she falls down; I have no strength to carry myself. Time and time again, I slip and nearly slide down the cliff.

Eventually we reach the top of the pass. In utter dismay I realize that instead of going downhill, we are on a plateau kilometres wide and covered in thick snow. Strong winds blow the snow and made it impossible to see the path in front of me. My flu worsens. I can hardly breathe; my chest aches. I am so thirsty, but my water is already finished. When I bend down to put some snow in my dry mouth, I lose my balance, and with great effort, I stand up, half covered in snow. Like a robot I stumble on. “Never give up! Never give up!” echoes in my mind. Hours later, I collapse in my tent for a night of coughing and high fever, thankful to God that He saved us from this sixteen-hour marathon nightmare.

The above extract from my journal reminds me of the Comrades Marathon in South Africa. It is an ultra-marathon that covers eighty-nine kilometres. According to many runners, it is the most difficult race in the world. Near the end of the course is a difficult hill called Polly Shortts. After hours of running, this hill will make or break a champion. Those who persevere at Polly Shortts finish the race well. A while ago, our ministry encountered a very severe storm. We wanted to give up, but then God showed us that we were running up a Polly Shortts. Don’t give up at the Polly Shortts in your race; the end is closer than you think.

In the Himalayas, we met a pastor who for many years had prepared a complete sermon each week and preached it every Sunday for his congregation. The only problem was, his congregation consisted only of his wife and mother. But he had faith and didn’t give up. Today his faithfulness has paid off and his church is growing. Never give up; the breakthrough is closer than you think.

God is always ready to help us through the storms of life. If you look at your storm, do you see only the dark clouds around you, or do you see an opportunity for a miracle? In Cape Town, we started three homes for foster children. The houses are close to each other and within walking distance of a school. In winter, the weather in Cape Town is very cold and wet, but we have no vehicle to take the children to school. So we asked God to help us. Many mornings I woke up to the sound of heavy rain on the roof, but at 7.15 a.m., when the children needed to start walking to school, it was often as if Someone closed a tap. The rain stopped, the children walked to school in dry weather, and then just after 7.45, when school started, the rain started again.

One time we organized a prayer walk in Cape Town. Unexpectedly, it started to rain heavily. Many people had come to join us for the walk and the vast majority came without umbrellas or raincoats, so we asked God to stop the rain. The rain did not stop, but the most wonderful thing happened. We did not get wet. After two hours of walking in the rain, we were still completely dry.

So often when we find ourselves in a “stormy situation”, we forget that we know the Creator. God can still the physical as well as the emotional storms in your life. Sometimes the rain stops, like it did when the children went to school. Other times the rain does not stop but you stay dry, untouched by the storm. Still other times the rain doesn’t stop and we became wet because the law of nature says that if you walk in the rain, you will become wet. If you do, it does not mean that God does not love you anymore. He is still good. We cannot look at His hand and decide whether He is good or not.

We have a Jack Russell dog named Julia. When I come out of the kitchen, she always looks at my hands to see if I have brought her a treat. When I have nothing in my hand for her, disappointment is obvious on her face. She misses the love in my eyes because she looks for the gift in my hand. So often I am like our Jack Russell. I only look at God’s hands to see what I can get. He is good. If He stops the rain, He is good. But if He does not stop the rain and I get wet, He is still good.

How can I find hope during the “storms” of my life?

If you want to have hope, you must understand His love for you. Only if you really believe He loves you, will you believe He does not want to hurt or harm or destroy you, even if you don’t understand why something happened to you. If you really know His love, you won’t need to know why.

I (Alti) struggle with my health. Since I started to understand that God really loves me, I have found it much easier to have faith in Him as my Healer, and, therefore, I can have hope even when healing has not been made manifest yet. Without a belief that God loves you, you will struggle to have faith and will often lose hope.

“So these three things continue forever: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13: 13, NCV).

A vast army came to attack Jehoshaphat and his people, and they sought the Lord’s help. In 2

Chronicles 20: 17, God encouraged them: “Go out to face them tomorrow, and the Lord will be with you” (NIV). Early the next morning they left for war, and

the Bible tells us: “Jehoshaphat appointed men to

sing to the LORD and to praise him for the splendour of his holiness as they went out at the head of the army, saying: ‘Give thanks to the LORD, for his love endures forever.’ As they began to sing and praise, the LORD set ambushes against the men… who were invading Judah, and they were defeated.”

(2 Chronicles 20: 21-22, NIV). What was the key to their victory? Was it the song? No, I believe it was

their understanding of God’s love for them. They

sang what they believed: “‘Give thanks to the LORD, for his love endures forever’” (emphasis added). Jehoshaphat understood God’s love for them;

therefore he had the faith to put the choir at the front of the army and lead the men to the battlefield in hope of victory.

If you know His love for you, you know His heart for you and that will comfort you in the midst of the storm. God never wants to hurt you. We live in a fallen world, and bad things do happen to us, but God is not the enemy. He only wants the best for us. Jehoshaphat and his people understood His love and could therefore keep on singing in the midst of a dangerous “storm”. They knew they were more than conquerors through Him who loved them.

In Men for God, David Pawson shares a story about someone else who could keep on singing in the midst of his storm, a Chinese man who was sent to prison for seventeen years because he became a Christian. In prison, he had to clean the sewerage system. In each prison cell was a hole that served as a toilet, and the human waste deposited in the hole emptied through a system of pipes into a large container. This man’s daily task was to empty the container with buckets and spread the waste outside in the field. Because he was very short, he could not reach the bottom of the container with the spade provided to him, so he had to jump inside the container and stand in human waste. The guards had forbidden him to sing and pray aloud in his cell, but now he stank so badly that no one wanted to be close to him. He could sing to his heart’s content. He only knew one Christian song, one that a missionary had taught him just before his arrest. It went: “I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses… and He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own.”

Every day the man jumped into the container full of human waste and sang in that place that could not possibly be more different from a garden full of roses. He testified that he was looking forward every day to visit his “garden of encounter”, because even there God walked with him and talked with him. This prisoner could easily have blamed God for his situation, but even in the midst of human waste, he could meet his God of love. If you know His love, you can keep on singing through the most severe storms. Don’t exclude God when you go through a tough time in your life, because He wants to be with you during your storm.

I heard another story about a boy who was in a terrible accident. An ambulance took him to the hospital and they called the doctor as well as the boy’s father. The father rushed to the hospital, but on the way, his car broke down. In desperation to reach the hospital, the father ran to the only other car he saw standing at a red light, opened the car’s door, grabbed the man behind the steering wheel and threw him onto the ground, and raced to the hospital in the hijacked car. After the father had waited for a while, the man whose car he had hijacked came into the waiting room. The father saw that this man wore a white jacket and a stethoscope and realized that this man was the doctor who had been on his way to safe his son’s life. The doctor gave the father the bad news that his son had died. The doctor had reached the hospital too late.

So often we treat God in the same way. We are often so stressed and desperate that we throw Him, the only one who can really help us through the storm, out of our lives. Embrace Him in the storm. God is not the enemy; He is your Shelter in the storm. If you know His love, you will know that He is good, all the time!

9: You Are Important to God

You are my Son, whom I love,

and I am very pleased with you.

—Luke 3: 22 (NCV)

During one of our visits to the Himalayas, we stayed

in a small town high in the mountains. We were

praying in our primitive overnight room, waiting for

God to lead us. Let my journal take you back to that day:

I walk to the window of our small overnight room and look out on the beautiful Himalayas. Downstairs the streets are buzzing with activity. The few women in the street are all veiled in black burkas, which cover their whole bodies. People walk in and out of the small shops full of textiles or spices. On the pavement, people are selling bags of rice or lentils. Dust covers the town. The cars and trucks drive around the cows standing in the middle of the street. A small boy with a shoe brush and polish advertises his skill: “Shining shoes, shining shoes while waiting!” I turn around and sit on the bed, waiting on the Lord.

“Be at the grand hotel down the road at 15:00,” God tells us. We are very excited because surely something amazing is going to happen at 15:00. We walk all the way to the hotel, probably the most luxurious one in town. Inside we wait in the restaurant. We give everyone who enters a friendly greeting, wondering if that person is our divine contact. After we have waited nearly an hour, still nothing has happened. The only two other people in the restaurant are engaged in a deep conversation and hardly notice us. We walk back to our cheap overnight room. Surely we heard wrong.

The next morning while praying, we hear God again: “Be at the grand hotel down the road

at 15:00.” We tell each other: “We had the

date wrong. Something will happen today at 15:00 at the hotel.” We walk around the hotel and later wait in the comfortable air-

conditioned restaurant for more than an hour. Again nothing happens. Very discouraged,

we go back to our hot overnight room and

pray: “Lord, there was nobody.” Immediately we feel Him answer us: “I was there. I was waiting for you in a nice air-conditioned restaurant so you would take some time off and relax. Why do you always want to do something for Me rather than just be with Me?”

How many tea dates with my Heavenly Bridegroom did I miss in life because I was so focused on what I could do for Him? Jesus died on the cross to make us His bride, not His slave.

People have children not because they want the children to work for them. We have children to enjoy them, to spend time with them as a family. The same is true with our Heavenly Father. He did not make us His children because He wanted us to work for Him. No, He wants to enjoy us. Our Father does not like you because you do things for Him but because you bring Him joy. You are not a substitute; you are God’s first choice!

I heard a story of a divorced father who could only see his daughter once a year. All year he looked forward to their time together. He planned many activities for them to do together, but after she arrived, she stayed in her room the whole time. She refused to come out to spend time with her father. Every day the father waited outside her room, but he waited in vain. On Christmas Day, she came out with a gift for him. It was a pair of socks she had knitted herself. All the time she was in her room, she was busy making the socks. She wanted to do something for him, but he only wanted her to be with him.

God called Jesus “My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased” before Jesus performed any miracle or preached a single sermon. His ministry started after that. Our Father is interested in you not because of what you can do for Him. You don’t need to do something in order to get His attention. If your motive for working for Him is right, your focus is the Father Himself and not the outcome of the task.

From the beginning, our church leaders knew that Hammie and I belonged together. So they made a plan to kick-start our friendship. They sent the two of us to a conference a couple hours’ drive away from our church. Well, we enjoyed it a lot and did not want the journey to end. The conference (even though it was a very blessed one) was less important to us than our journey together. Don’t let the task become so important to you that you miss the journey with your King.

One of our foster boys is not a good athlete, but he likes to participate. When he runs a race, my eyes are only on him because I love him so much. It is not important whether he wins or loses. It is he, and not a medal, that is important. God’s eyes are on me, never mind what I do or achieve for Him. He loves me, not my achievements. As Zephaniah 3: 17 tells us: “The Lord your God is with you… He will rejoice over you. You will rest in his love; he will sing and be joyful about you” (NCV).

Maybe you still wonder how you can be important to God.

The garbage in our trash can does not have any value. But say, for instance, that I put my diamond ring in the trash can. Suddenly the contents have value and I would not let the waste truck come and collect the trash. When you become a Christian, the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of the Living God) starts to live in you. He has value, and even if you feel unimportant, you have value, not because of what you do, but because of Who is in you.

10: Who Will Roll the Stone Away?

They said to each other,

“Who will roll away for us the stone

that covers the entrance of the tomb?”

—Mark 16: 3 (NCV)

After Jesus was crucified, He was buried in a tomb: “Joseph bought some linen cloth, took the body down from the cross, and wrapped it in the linen. He put the body in a tomb that was cut out of a wall of rock. Then he rolled a very large stone to block the entrance of the tomb… The day after the Sabbath day, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought some sweet-smelling spices to put on Jesus’ body” (Mark 15: 46, 16: 1; NCV).

As the three women were walking to Jesus’ grave, they asked each other, “Who will roll away for us the stone that covers the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark 16: 3 NCV). The stone in front of the tomb was too heavy for them to roll away, but that didn’t keep them from going to the tomb.

Mark 16: 4 continues: “Then the women looked and saw that the stone had already been rolled away, even though it was very large” (NCV). Jesus had risen from the dead. He was alive! If these women hadn’t gone to the tomb, they wouldn’t have found out that Jesus had risen from the grave. So often we are so worried about something, but we also find that the stone in front of our situation has already been rolled away when we reach it.

During one of our hikes to pray for the unreached tribes we were working amongst in the Himalayas, we had to cross a very dangerous and strong flowing river. Before the hike I had read that hikers must cross the river in a basket suspended from a cable. They climb in the basket and pull themselves along the rope over to the other side. Many locals had drowned there. Just the thought of hanging in a basket over this roaring river made me very afraid. Who would roll this stone away for me? How would I cross the river? I prayed and asked God to give me courage to cross that river. What I didn’t know was that a couple of weeks before we had to cross that river, the army had also had to cross it and had built a new bridge over it. When we arrived at the crossing, we simply walked over the bridge. This stone had been rolled away for me.

During that same hike, we had to cross a side stream of this river filled with icy glacier water. We had to jump from rock to rock to cross it. The rocks were very slippery. Our guide helped me, but the crossing was very difficult. The moment I reached the other side, I started to worry about getting back across on our return. The next couple of days I often thought about it and tried to plan for it in my head, but I realized that my plans didn’t give me peace. Who would roll this stone in my life away? How would I cross the river again? I prayed that my Heavenly Father would please help me. Days later, when we got to that side stream again, something very strange happened. The flow of the river had changed dramatically and we didn’t need to cross; we could continue on the same side we were already on. This stone had been rolled away for me.

So often we worry about things God has already taken care of.

But sometimes it feels to us as if God does not take

care of things. During one of our journeys to the Himalayas, we had to fly in a small aeroplane and land on one of the shortest and most dangerous landing strips in the world. I wrote the following in my journal:

I grab the seat as the aeroplane flies into an air pocket. We fall down several metres in a vacuum. The engine makes funny roaring sounds as we try to regain altitude. I hate these flights. The cockpit is open and I can look through the front window from my seat as we fly in a zigzag in the narrow valley past the steep cliffs. In horror I see we are flying straight towards a mountain. We are going to crash! We are going to crash! The aeroplane hits a gravel road and dust completely obscures our visibility. The plane slides to the one side of the road and the pilot pulls it wildly to the other side and switches off the engines. Within seconds, the doors are open and we are forced out. Once outside, I realize that we just landed on one of the shortest and most dangerous landing strips in the world, a gravel road travelling up a mountain slope. My whole body is shaking. I grab my bag and wonder if I was secretly part of a spy movie. We must go back in this same aeroplane after our hike. Who will roll this stone away for me? I don’t have the nerve to repeat this flight… .

Sometimes in life, God provides a “bridge” for us to cross or changes the “flow of the river” to help us, but many times He does not remove the problem and

we just need to go through it. In these times, He does not roll the stone away, but He is with us, like He was with Daniel’s friends in the fire in Daniel 3: 24-25: “Then King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished; and he rose in haste and spoke, saying to his counselors,

‘Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?’ They answered and said to the king, ‘True, O king.’ ‘Look!’ he answered, ‘I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire; and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.’” (NKJ).

My journal entry continues:

I am sitting once again in the same aeroplane we arrived in. The pilot roars the engines. The man in front of me passes out from fear. I grab the seat in a death grip and hold my breath. The plane rolls down the landing strip at a very high speed for take-off. The landing strip is very short and we need to be in the air very quickly. The plane is too heavy. The pilot shouts some orders to the airhostess. She opens the door while we’re in motion and kicks out some luggage. We are still too heavy. We reach the end of the landing strip and the plane is still on the ground. The pilot just drives the plane off the cliff. We are falling. It feels as if the pilot is trying to jump-start the engines in the air. Eventually we gain some altitude and we are on our way. Although the flight is extremely bumpy, we fly to our destination and land safely.

God didn’t roll my stone away, but I could go through it because Jesus’ stone was rolled away. He is alive, and His victory is ours for every difficult situation in our lives.

According to 2 Samuel 5: 6-7: “The king [David] and his men marched to Jerusalem to attack the Jebusites, who lived there. The Jebusites said to David, ‘You will not get in here; even the blind and the lame can ward you off.’ They thought, ‘David cannot get in here.’ Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion, the City of David” (NIV, emphasis added).

No matter how impossible your situation appears to be, there is always a “nevertheless”. Maybe you are in a financial or work crisis, or maybe you are in a health crisis or a relationship crisis. Whatever your problem is, there is a nevertheless because His stone was rolled away; He is alive. Don’t look at the impossibility of the situation; look to God, who can make a way where there seems to be no way.

Sometimes we take the children living in our foster homes on an outing on a train. While waiting for the train, some of them always want me to give them their train tickets. But I know them; they will probably lose the ticket before the train arrives. So I don’t give them their tickets. Instead, I hold their tickets in my hand until the time is right to give the tickets to them. In this system, the children can either trust that everything is taken care of, even though they don’t hold their own tickets, and still get on the train, or they can decide that I am not telling the truth about the tickets and not get on the train and then miss out on a wonderful outing. So often we don’t trust that God takes care of our future and we don’t seem to want to get on our “train”. But our Heavenly Father has the ticket (the plan, the solution, the provision, or the remedy) in His hand. We don’t know what tomorrow looks like, but we do know Who has tomorrow in His hands. When we get to tomorrow, we often find that everything is already taken care of; the stone has already been rolled away.

11: God Will Open the Door

I will open doors for you so

city gates will not stop you.

—Isaiah 45: 1 (NCV)

When we began to work in the Himalayas, we had no contacts and didn’t know how to begin planting churches, training leaders, and providing Christian materials for the twelve tribes God called us to. We just left South Africa in faith and asked God to open the doors for us. One of the first tribes we visited was a radical group practising a false religion that did not allow any outsiders into their community. I captured my impressions in my journal as follows:

We are staying in a village within walking distance from this tribe. Daily we walk into their area to pray. As we enter their community, the atmosphere changes to hostility. Men glare at me with hate in their eyes. They live on a mountain slope in mud houses which perfectly blend in with the colours of rock and sand. We greet them with friendliness, but no one answers our efforts to reach out. We walk to the river and sit down on a rock next to some women from this tribe who busily wash their clothes. We just watch them. They wet a garment in the river, lather it with soap, and

then hit it with a stick until it is clean. Then

they take the next garment and repeat the sequence. It takes hours to clean the clothes. We keep on sitting. A well-dressed man passes on the road next to the river. The women call him to come closer and ask him to translate. He hesitates, but they are adamant to tell me something. He translates, “Please come to the wedding in our town tomorrow.” Relieved for an opening into this community, I immediately agree to come. But how can we attend a wedding if we have not been invited by the bride or bridegroom?

Early the next morning, we wake up and dress for the wedding. We still don’t know how we

will enter. As we walk to the town, a whole convoy of jeeps pass us on the narrow dirt track. This is the groom and his guests on their way to the wedding. They are in a party spirit and stop next to us and ask, “Do you need a lift?” They don’t know we are on our way to the wedding, but they give us a lift right up to the wedding venue. When we get out of the jeep, the parents of the bride think we are with the bridegroom and take us by the arm and seat us in a place of honour. At one time during the ceremony, they even let me sit between the bridegroom and the bride and take many pictures of us together. I feel like the mother-in-law. This gives us a lot of favour in the community, and some of the guests invite us to their houses.

After that day, many doors opened for us, and we could minister in that previously closed area. Physically we arrived at the wedding with the bridegroom, and spiritually we arrived with our Bridegroom to invite His bride to spend eternity with Him.

God is so good!

When we and our local friends arrived at the home of another tribe high in the Himalayas, the same question was on our minds: “How will we enter this group?” The answer lies within the pages of my journal:

My tired body rocks to the left, falls back to the right, hops again and again… This goes on for hours as we travel on an extremely bad dirt road over one of the highest motorable mountain passes in the world. I climb out of the jeep, glad to stretch my painful body. A freezing wind cuts through my clothes, and I shiver. I look around at the nomadic people, and their tents became one with the dust in

the air and the desert sand around them.

Some yaks walk past us. I drink in the picture in front of me. Many children surround us, looking at us curiously. Some touch me to make sure this white-faced woman is real.

I remember the bottle of bubbles which God

told me to bring along. I take it out from my pocket and start to blow bubbles in the air.

They have never seen anything like that

before. They jump up and down and laugh

out of pure joy and excitement. More children come running towards us. Their parents

also come out of the tents to see what is happening. They also look on with fascination at the bubbles, and some even play with the children trying to catch the bubbles. Then they invite us into their tents, still smiling and laughing.

The inside of a tent is filled with smoke and dust. An altar to their false god takes up a large space inside. We sit on the floor on a carpet close to the fire. It is nice and warm.

A woman with a beautiful smile starts to

prepare something for us to eat. First she sets in front of us a small cup containing their speciality for the cold weather, salt-butter tea (this is exactly what it sounds like: salt, butter and tea in one cup). Then she brings us a mixture of flour and goat cheese to eat. Hammie whispers to me, “There are so many hairs in my food, I can eat and floss my teeth at the same time.” We share with them about Jesus and fall in love with these lovely people with soft hearts. We thank them and move on to the next tent. These people serve us the same tea and food. This repeats from tent to tent. But by the end of the day, God has given our local friends and us so much favour

among this tribe that their leader writes our names in their guest-of-honour book. They agree that we can send a Christian teacher

to teach their children and that later we can

also give them a MegaVoice (an electronic audio device containing many hours of the

Bible as well as teachings in their own

language) to every tent in their community.

I have to bow down low to get out of the last tent we visit for the day. I breathe heavily

from the high altitude. My stomach turns

from all the strange food and drinks we had today. I look for a toilet, but they don’t have

any. Desperately I look around for a bush

or a rock to hide behind, but I see only

kilometres and kilometres of desert sand and find nowhere to hide. I clench my teeth, climb into the jeep, and know this will be a long

journey back. A large crowd gathers around

our jeep; everyone has a big smile on his or her face. Great joy for God’s faithfulness fills my heart (in spite of my body’s discomfort), and as we drive out of their settlement, they keep on waving until our car is just a blur on the horizon.

God is so good!

We visited another tribe. I wrote in my journal:

We have been driving for hours on a dusty dirt road looking for the new tribe God has placed on our hearts. If the earth were flat and had an end, I would think we just reached it. It feels as if we have driven out of any kind of civilization. We don’t see any signs of life, only very high mountains. We keep on driving, but we left

the “main road” hours ago. We have no idea where we are going. “Can anyone still live here?” I say to myself. Suddenly we see a house built out of big rocks. We stop to ask for directions: “Sir, we are lost and are looking for the leader of this tribe. Can you please direct us to his house? We have no idea who he is or where he lives.” A tall man wearing traditional clothes answers us: “I am the leader. Please come in and spend the rest of the day with my family.” We sit together on the beautiful carpet on the floor; there are no chairs in the whole house. We eat dried apricots and walnuts while sharing about life and Life and building a relationship.

Again God has opened the door by leading us straight to the house of the right person. After that day in the leader’s house, the gospel could be spread among these people who have lived for years without Jesus.

God is so good!

God added a new tribe to our list to visit, pray for, and reach out to. We had never visited this tribe before.

We flew into that Himalayan country and went to a travel agency to book a taxi to take us to this tribe. The travel agent told us that the leader of this tribe was in town. This leader planned to go to this tribe the next day, and agreed to take us with him. I want to take you back to what happened that day according to my journal:

We are driving in a government car with the leader. We have not been stopped at any of the checkpoints. We are given a wave, and we just pass through. We (Hammie and Alti) are sitting with this leader in the car and talking about his Buddhist religion while we drive past a

monastery. “This is a very famous monastery, named after a very good Buddhist monk who lived a long time ago named Althi,” he tells us. After a while, he tells us about another famous monastery named after a very good Buddhist monk who lived a long time ago named Hammiesh. Then suddenly it strikes him: he is

in the car with Alti and Hammie, and he immediately believes that we are reincarnations of Althi and Hammiesh. This gives us so much favour in his eyes. He then gives us VIP treatment: he lets us sleep in the government house, and he gives us permission to come back with any project. He even introduces us to the other key people of the tribe.

God used our names to open the door for many more outreaches to this group. After that day in the car, we shared the Truth many other times in that area and saw how God changed these people’s hearts.

God is so good!

For a long time we wanted to start a ministry in one of the poorer areas of Cape Town, but we also didn’t know how to go about it. One night I had a dream in which we took forty toasted sandwiches to a park and handed them out. I recognized the park in my dream. I woke up and prepared the toasted sandwiches in faith, but I wondered where we would find forty people in a park on a Wednesday morning. When we arrived at that park, we were surprised to see how many people were standing around there. I counted them: there were forty people. Many had lost their jobs and hung out in the park during the day. Hammie ministered to them, and then we handed out the toasted sandwiches. That opened the door for future ministry, and each week, we went back to follow up. God opened the door with a dream, because these desperate people without hope were in His heart.

God is so good!

One day we visited a town ruled by a false religion in a place where Christianity is not allowed and evangelism is illegal. We sat in our hotel room and prayed that God would open a door to these lost people. The next moment, the door opened and a strange man walked into our private room. We stopped him at the door, but on his way out, I handed him some Christian literature.

As he left the room, he said while pointing to the literature, “Thank you. I am a journalist and want a new story.” We were stunned. If he wrote about us handing out Christian literature, we could be arrested before the sun went down that night. We prayed, “Lord, we made a big mistake. We want You to open a door for us to minister to these people, but now we have closed it ourselves. Please don’t let this man go to the newspapers and tell of our handing out Christian literature.” The next day, the journalist came back and said, “I have some questions about this literature. Can you please explain it to me?” We invited him in; still afraid it might be a trap. We explained the gospel to him. Suddenly this man started to cry, repented, and accepted Jesus. He told us that he was a journalist for four newspapers and wanted to tell all his readers about Jesus.

For a long time he was our disciple. He used the things we taught him as framework for his newspaper stories to sow seeds of doubt about the false god his country worshipped. He caused many to seek the Truth. He led his whole family and many of his friends to Jesus. We wanted to reach a nation, so God sent a journalist. Today God uses him as a fearless Paul in a lost country.

God is so good!

When you know that God sends you somewhere, just start moving, even if you cannot see the big picture. Often we need to move before we can see His plan unfold. Just start moving. He will open the doors in His time and prepare the hearts and change lives. What an exciting journey! God is so good!

12: He Is Our Healer

And you are healed because of his wounds.

—1 Peter 2: 24 (NCV)

During one of our journeys to the Himalayas, Hammie fell into a deep hole and broke his leg. I can clearly remember that day:

We are walking in the streets of one of the Himalayan towns. Everywhere on the pavement are huge holes and we carefully stroll around them. We walk past many kinds of shops. One shop sells only decorations and many glittery ornaments. The next shop is just a table with a telephone on it. The owner proudly advertises that you can even phone overseas from his shop. The next shop is full of all kinds of plastic ware, and bright, colourful mugs and jugs hang from the ceiling. Fascinated by what we see, we are discussing the shops as we walk. We forget to look out for the holes in the pavement. Suddenly, Hammie falls into one of the holes. His leg is badly bruised and starts to swell immediately. He experiences severe pain. He cannot move it or step on it at all. We are in big trouble because the medical care in this area is very poor. We lay our hands on his leg, call out to our Healer, and speak healing over his leg. As we pray, a curious crowd gathers around us and some people shout, “Hospital! Hospital!”

Out of nowhere, a jeep stops next to us. A man we have never seen before jumps out of the jeep with a spray bottle in his hand. He sprays something up and down Hammie’s leg. Within seconds, he jumps back into the jeep and drives away quickly. Immediately, Hammie’s leg heals. The swelling is gone, the black-and-blue bruises disappear, and he can step on it. Surprised by what has just happened, he walks back to our hotel room without any discomfort.

God is so good!

During one of our flights to the Himalayas, I (Alti) got a very serious ear infection. When the aeroplane landed, I felt as if my eardrum had burst. By the time we got to our primitive hotel, I had developed a high fever. I took a water bottle out of the fridge to drink. Disappointed, I realized that the water was totally frozen. To defrost it quickly, I pressed it against my glowing hot cheek and painful ear. After a while, I realized that the pain had stopped. I remembered that my mother always put ice on her inflammation. “Thank you, Lord,” I said. Then I felt Him say to me, “I prepared that bottle especially for you to ease the pain and stop the inflammation before your next flight tomorrow. Go and look in the fridge at the other three bottles of water which were standing next to this frozen one.” Amazed, I saw that none of the other bottles were frozen; they were not even cold. My ear infection disappeared and I could go on with the outreach.

God is so good!

Throughout all our hikes to take the gospel to the tribes living high in the Himalayas, I (Alti) struggled with my feet. My feet are very sensitive, and most of the time I feel discomfort just putting on shoes. During one of our hikes, my feet hurt so much that I couldn’t walk any further.

It was only the second day of our hike. The sun was scorching. We put on factor 100 sunblock, but our skin still burned and blistered. My health was not good, and on top of everything, my feet hurt. With every step, it felt like needles cut into my feet. With each step, I repeated 1 Samuel 2: 9: “He will guard the feet of His saints” (NKJV).

As I walked, the joy of being able to suffer for the gospel filled me. Then God asked me, “How many plasters do you have on your feet?” I had put plasters all over them to protect the blisters. “Take off all the plasters,” God said. “But, Lord, the road is full of stones and I cannot walk anymore on my sore feet.” After I said that, I realized with shock that I had placed my trust in the plasters instead of in the Word of God. This was idolatry. Immediately, I took off all the plasters, and at that moment, my feet healed. I didn’t get any more blisters or experience any pain or discomfort in my feet for the rest of the hike. Sometimes I even felt as if I walked not on my own feet but with the feet of Someone else.

God is so good!

One time God called us to walk to two tribes in the Himalayas. To reach them, we had to walk for twenty-nine days. At the beginning of the hike, I (Hammie) got very sick and vomited all night. I wrote the following in my journal:

I was sick all night, and today my body aches and I feel extremely nauseous. With great effort, I lift my backpack onto my back and start to hike. I focus only on my Healer and His strength to carry me through this tough hike. With every step I feel the energy draining out of my body. It feels as if somebody has pulled out a plug in my body to allow all the energy to run out of me. But I have to go on, higher and higher. The heat of the day combined with my high fever make me sweat tremendously. My T-shirt looks like I took a shower with it on because of all the sweat. As we pass a local boy, he calls to our guide and asks him while pointing to my wet T-shirt, “Is he leaking?”

At ten o’clock I cannot go on anymore. We have already tried all our medicine, but still my condition worsens. “I wish I could just give you Coke to drink. That always helps me when I feel so nauseous,” Alti says desperately. “We are high up in the Himalayas, far away from civilization. How would that be possible?” I reply. The next moment, as I reach the top of a cliff, I see a local woman sitting on a rock with a bottle of Coke. She tries to sell it to us. Thankful, we buy it, and as I drink it sip by sip, I can feel my body start to heal.

God is so good! God surely is the Healer.

As I (Alti) wrote before, while I worked in Iraq, I became sick, and I have struggled with my health for the last seventeen years. Some nights I fought for my life. I have pain every day and feel tired nearly every day. The fact that I am not healed does not mean that God is not the Healer, however. He is good and I know that everything will work out for the best. Over these years I came to know God as a good God, One who teaches me, helps me, carries me and loves me. As I look back over my struggle with my health, I don’t blame God for not healing me, because I tasted and saw that God is good. His plans for me are good. I have learnt not to let my body dictate what I do but to live from my spirit. My spirit is not sick. My spirit can do all things, even overrule my body. Therefore, I can rest and have hope in the midst of pain and still proclaim: God is my Healer!

God is good. If He heals, He is good. If He does not heal, He is still good. What a wonderful God we have!

13: Under the Shelter of His Wings

He will cover you with his feathers,

and under his wings you will find refuge.

—Psalm 91: 4 (NIV)

I heard a story about a barn that burnt down. After

the fire was extinguished, the farmer checked the

barn for signs of life. He saw that his livestock had been roasted to death. Everything was burnt to

ashes. He saw with surprise that even his chicken had died. Why hadn’t it run away? It could easily

have fit though the bars of the fence. Then he saw some movement under the hen. “Peep, peep,” he heard, and one after the other, chicks came crawling out from under their dead mother’s wings. Under

the protection of the mother hen’s wings, the chicks hadn’t been harmed by the fire at all. The mother

hen gave her life to protect her young. This story reminds me of Jesus, Who gave His life for us and

Who keeps us safe today under His wings. As missionaries, we learnt to crawl under His wings to find our shelter and peace.

Before every outreach, we ask God to give us

promises from the Bible for our time ahead. These promises are like wings; we can crawl under them and find shelter close to His breast. During the outreach, we remind Him of these promises. God often gives a specific promise to help us through a specific situation.

Promise: “For who is God except our Lord? Who but he is as a rock? He fills me with strength and protects me wherever I go.” Psalm 18: 31-32 (TLB)

I lay on my mattress in our tent, pitched high in the Himalayas at the bottom of a mountain slope. It was very quiet. I fell asleep with a peacefulness unknown in that dark area. Both of us woke up at the same time to the rumbling sound of a waterfall of rocks rolling in our direction. We called to God for help. The rocks sped closer and closer, right to our tents. The rumbling intensified. We tried to get out of our sleeping bags and unzip the tent to flee, but it felt as if everything happened in slow motion. “Lord, help us!” we called out in His name. Eventually we opened the tent door, but the rocks were already only metres from us. Then, suddenly, the rocks stopped, as if held back by an invisible hand. We got out of the tent and saw all the big rocks that had rolled down the mountain in the rockslide. There was no reason why they should have stopped before our tent, but our Rock commanded the rocks to stop, and they obeyed Him. God is so good!

Promise: “Though I am surrounded by troubles, you will bring me safely through them.” Psalm 138: 7 (TLB)

Another time when we were on our way to minister to a tribe in the Himalayas, we had booked a large car for the long journey over the mountains, but when it arrived to pick us up, we found it was a very small car. We and all our materials and our local teammate squeezed into the car. “It will be a long, uncomfortable day,” I thought as I wedged myself into the cramped back seat. After a couple of hours’ drive, we reached a high mountain pass. Many vehicles were stopped at the foot of the pass. The other drivers told us there had been a big rockslide and that no large vehicles could go through for the next day or two. Our small car manoeuvred through all the rocks and arrived safely at the top of the pass; ours was the only vehicle that could make it to the top. God knew about the rockslide and didn’t want us to sit for two days waiting for the road to be cleared, so He sent us a small car that we could reach our destination on time.

God is our protection. He can stop the rocks just in time, He can also arrange the rocks in such a way that our car can pass through them. He can do anything He wants. He is a loving Father and only wants the best for us.

Promise: “The Lord will keep you from all harm . . . the Lord will watch over your coming and going”. Psalm 121: 7-8 (NIV)

One of the tasks God called us to do in the Himalayas was to help translate the gospel into the local languages and then to record it on the MegaVoice (a small solar-powered electronic device that contains many hours of recordings of the Bible). We prepared hundreds of MegaVoices and had to courier them to other countries. If we had been caught, the authorities would surely have confiscated the devices, and we could even have ended up in jail. Our journal tells the rest of the story:

We arrive before the other couriers so we have time to arrange everything. I am standing in the airport at the luggage carousel waiting

for our bags. The bags are first X-rayed

before they are placed on the carousel. I wait and wait for my bag. Eventually the carousel stops; all the bags have been taken. A policeman walks up to me carrying my black suitcase full of MegaVoices. My heart skips a beat or two. I want to run away. He asks, “Madam, is this your suitcase?” I feel tempted to lie like Peter the night he betrayed Jesus and say, “I’ve never seen this bag before.” But the rooster in my heart crows three times, and I willingly lay down my life and say, “Yes, sir, it belongs to me.” “Follow me,” he commands me. None of Hammie’s personal luggage has arrived, and we tell the policeman that we first need to go to the query desk for help. We spend a long time at the query desk, during which the policeman’s shift ends. He just sets my suitcase down in the middle of the airport hall and goes off duty. In the couple of minutes between shifts, we finish at the query desk, pick up my suitcase, and walk out of the building.

God has told Hammie to carry the suitcase

full of MegaVoices on his shoulder, like the priests carried the ark. After all the attention,

we want to move as if invisible, but that is

hardly possible when Hammie is the only man in the airport carrying a suitcase on his shoulder. But nobody stops us again, not

even at the door, to check our luggage tags.

We just walk out, Hammie still carrying the valuable MegaVoices on his shoulder. We take a taxi to our hotel where we hide the suitcase under the bed. More MegaVoices will arrive soon.

I sit at the airport again. Different couriers will arrive soon, all of them on different airlines. The information board start to flash “Flight delayed” for one flight after another. I become more excited. So often in chaotic situations in the past we saw how God worked. Then, all the flights land, one after the other. The airport is bursting at the seams. Customs officials, unable to handle four arrivals at the same time, rush the people through. One by one the couriers come past all the checkpoints. Hundreds of MegaVoices enter the country. God is so good!

Promise: “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge”. Psalm 91: 4 (NIV)

One time after finishing our work, we sat in our cheap hotel room waiting to fly out of the country early the next morning.

Somebody knocked on the door. Before we could answer, the person knocked again. Hammie opened the door. The police were standing outside. Without any explanation, they commanded him to follow them. I ran after them, asking, “Sir, what is going on? Where are you taking my husband?” The police ignored me. “Sir, what is going on?” I tried again. “Get in your room and stay there if you want to see your husband again,” one of the officers said. His eyes told me he was serious. I went back to the room and prayed and waited. After an hour, Hammie had not returned. I went downstairs and asked the desk clerk if he knew where Hammie was. “Don’t worry, madam, at the right time, he will maybe come back,” he said. I went back to my room and prayed more and waited. “What if he doesn’t come back? Where do I go for help?”

In the meantime, the police took Hammie to a room to interrogate him about our work and try to frighten him. After some time they let him go but warned him that they would come to the airport the next day to arrest us. A policeman said goodbye with these words: “You will not leave this country unharmed.”

After Hammie returned, we prayed all night and asked God to help us leave the country. The next morning we experienced one of our easiest departures from a country. Nobody stopped us; nobody asked

any questions. We just left the country under the

cover of His wings, as Psalm 91 promised. God is so good!

Promise: “Just as the mountains surround and protect Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds and protects his people.” Psalm 125: 2 (TLB)

It seems there is always some kind of riot or protest in the Himalayan countries where we worked. On our way to preach at a church, the three-wheel rickshaw we were in, drove into a traffic jam and came to a halt. The traffic didn’t move at all. When we looked out, we saw hundreds of people with banners walking towards us. The people were protesting against people from the West working in their country. We realized that our two white faces would be a target sitting right in front of them, but we had nowhere to flee. We called to God for protection.

That same instant, thousands of miles away, members of our church back in South Africa, Die Wynstok,

felt that they must pray for us. They stood in a

circle holding hands and asked God to surround

and protect us at that exact moment. While they

were praying, hundreds of angry protestors walked right past us without seeing us at all. God is so

good!

Promise: “He found them in a desert, a windy, empty land. He surrounded them and brought them up, guarding them as those he loved very much. He was like an eagle building its nest that flutters over its young. It spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its feathers.” Deuteronomy 32: 10-11 (NCV)

In some of the countries where we have worked, persecution of Christians is a grim reality. Often we let the Christian leaders come to us for training in a safer place where we have rented rooms in a hotel. Getting caught could cost them their lives, but with the promise presented above, we arranged one specific training with peace in our hearts. My journal tells of this time as follows:

Sweat is dripping from my face. It is 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) outside. We and all the leaders cram into a small hotel room. This meeting could cost them their lives, but that doesn’t bother them. They are all excited to be here. We teach them about the life of the eagle and how eagles can

soar above the storms in their lives. As we teach, an eagle comes and sits just outside our window. Our hotel is in the middle of a city. Where has the eagle come from? It stays the whole day.

Early the next morning, the same eagle (we know it because it has a chip in one of its wings) comes again, and it comes again the next day. As promised in Deuteronomy 32, the eagle guards us, fluttering over its young, the whole time.

After the training sessions, we went to another city, but after two weeks we returned and stayed in another hotel. When we opened our curtain in the hotel room, our eagle with the chip in its wing was waiting for us outside. God was protecting us. God is so good!

Promise: “My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4: 19 (KJV)

A few weeks after I (Alti) urgently underwent a very big operation, we were going to the Himalayas. We planned the whole trip before the operation was scheduled and

we decided to continue with the trip. The only problem was that I still had stitches and could not sit on the

ground, as is the custom in the houses we planned to

visit, or squat to use the Middle Eastern toilets. We

prayed a lot and asked God whether we should go.

He clearly told us to go; He would supply everything

I needed. During the outreach I could not bend or

squat, but every time I needed to use the toilet, I

could easily squat at the locals’ hole-in-the-ground toilets without any discomfort. While driving in the

car on very bad gravel roads, it felt as if I was sitting

on a balloon which cushioned the bumps. I didn’t

feel any discomfort the whole journey. God took

care of me and even provided a chair for me in every house we visited or place we preached. God is so good!

Promise: “Surely when the mighty waters [snow] rise, they will not reach him. You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble”. Psalm 32: 6-7 (NIV)

During the outreach when I still had stitches, we went over the highest motorable road in the world. On our journey back, Hammie came down with severe influenza and even started to cough up blood. We were scheduled to fly back to South Africa very early the next day and were in a hurry to get him medical care. While driving over this extremely high mountain pass, it started to snow heavily, as it had in the days before.

The snow trails on this mountain pass were very narrow and slippery, and our car moved very slowly. Suddenly we heard thunder and the vehicles in front of us came to a stop. We just missed a very big avalanche, which blocked the road completely. It took hours for a bulldozer to come from the opposite direction over the pass to clear the road. For hours we sat in the snow, freezing in the car, as we could not run the engine the whole time. Hammie started to cough uncontrollably. After six hours we still waited for the road to be cleared. Cars queued for miles down the snowy mountain pass. After eight hours we still waited in the car. It was dark. We were hungry, thirsty, and very cold. Our flight to South Africa would leave in a few hours, and we were still stuck high in the mountains. After nearly ten hours, the vehicles in front of us slowly started to move. We followed them on the slippery, muddy trail. Often we barely managed not to slide over the edge. At some places, the snow next to the road was higher than our car. Visibility was poor. After we crossed the top of the pass and started to descend, I looked behind me and said to Basie and Ria (the South African couple with us in the car), “It is strange, but I don’t see the lights of any other car following us, but there were so many vehicles behind us. Where are they?”

When we reached the place where we were to stay overnight, we heard that just after we passed through the previously blocked road, another big avalanche took the bulldozer and some of the other cars behind us with it down the mountain slope and blocked the road completely. Back in South Africa, we read that the rest of the vehicles waited on the pass for two days before the road was cleared again. God cleared the road for us so we could catch our flight on time. He also protected us from the avalanche and saved us once more to tell about His goodness.

Promise: “I will lie down and sleep in peace”. Psalm 4: 8 (NIV)

On our way to K2, we walked and slept for days on the largest glacier in the world outside of the Poles. At night we could hear the cracking sounds of the ice moving beneath us. It felt as if we were sleeping in a freezer. Our sleeping bags were not rated to keep us warm for the night temperatures that were far below freezing. We knew this when we left South Africa, but we couldn’t afford warmer sleeping bags. Just before we left South Africa, I sat in the church and prayed about our sleeping bags: “Lord, can we go on this outreach with our cheap sleeping bags, or will they be inadequate?” At that moment, a book fell off the chair in front of me. The title on the front page read “Whether Cold or Hot, I Will Take Care of You”. I felt that God wanted us to put our trust in Him, not in our sleeping bags. Every night on the glacier, we never felt cold. In the mornings, everything in our tents was frozen, even the water in our bottles inside our backpacks, but the hot water bottles we kept with us in our cheap sleeping bags were still nice and warm. God kept us warm during the cold nights. We could lie down and sleep in peace. God is so good!

Promise: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” Exodus 14: 14 (NIV)

We climbed out of the aeroplane in the heart of

Africa. The tempo of life was slow. We went through customs and waited for our luggage. Everyone else from the flight had left, but we still waited. Our luggage was not on the plane. The man responsible for the luggage said, “Don’t worry; maybe it will

come tomorrow.” That brought no comfort to us.

We went to our guesthouse knowing that it was impossible for us to do anything more. We didn’t know if the airport was even able to contact the airline in South Africa to request that our luggage be sent on the next flight.

We remembered the promise God gave us in

Exodus 14. He promised He would fight for us. We trusted Him to do that. The next day, in faith, we

went to the airport. We weren’t allowed to drive all the way to the airport because we were not flying

that day, so we had to walk the last few hundred metres to the airport building. Just before we entered, I saw our two suitcases on the pavement. They had arrived and someone had put them outside. No one had stolen them, and nothing was lost. God did fight for us and He protected our bags. God is so good!

Promise: “When he opens a door, no one can close it.” Revelation 3: 7 (NCV)

In the Himalayas, the Christians hunger for Christian material. On every trip, we took Bibles and literature with us, praying that God would blind the customs officials` eyes because Christian material was illegal in most of the countries we visited. Each trip gave us a testimony of how God helped us through.

One time God placed in my heart the desire to buy

a cricket magazine in South Africa. I didn’t understand why but obeyed. When we got to customs, we had

to let our bags containing all our Christian material

go through the X-ray machine. As our bags started

to go through, I stood with the cricket magazine in my hands and asked the man watching the X-rayed bags, “Sir, must I also put this magazine on the

belt?” When he saw that it was a cricket magazine, he got up from behind the screen to have a

closer look at it. He was obviously a huge cricket

fan. While he looked through the magazine, our

bags passed through the unmanned machine.

Hammie quickly put them on a trolley and went out the door.

On another occasion, I (Hammie) and two South African teammates entered a Himalayan country with bags loaded with Christian material. In front of us, workers loaded all the passengers’ luggage onto the belt to go through the X-ray machine with no respect, throwing bags on and off the belt, opening them, and confiscating anything they wanted. We were next in line. Suddenly a stranger came up to us and said, “Follow me.” This is exactly what we did. Like we were invisible, we passed the security guards who forced passengers to load their bags onto the belt. This kind stranger commanded the officer guarding the door, “Let them go through.” That man obeyed immediately. No one stopped us, no one asked questions, and no one opened our bags full of wonderful Christian material. We left the building, and as we looked back, we saw all the other passengers still busily loading their bags to be checked.

On our return flight, the guards made us completely unpack our bags several times. Only then did we really understand the greatness of the miracle we had experienced when we arrived with our material, which surely would have been confiscated if it had been found with us.

God usually used distraction to get us through

customs. Our luggage was also often greatly

overweight because of all the material we brought with us. Time and again when we put it on the

scale, the scale just stopped working and the

officials just let our luggage through. As soon as

our luggage was through, the scale miraculously started to work again. Sometimes the officials opened our bags full of material but didn’t see anything.

God just blinded them to the material. God is so good!

Promise: “So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?’” Hebrews 13: 6 (NIV)

After we couriered hundreds of MegaVoice devices into one Himalayan country, we had to distribute them to the different tribes. One group of young people came from a neighbouring country to courier them back to their home town. Let me share what happened as recorded in my journal:

I greet the young men in the lobby of the hotel. They have travelled for days to get here. We will give them training for a week, and then they will take the MegaVoices back with them across the border. Some of them look like schoolboys. “They are too young to be couriers. What if something happens to them?” I think. I book them into the hotel, and we take the lift to their floor. It is their first time in a lift. “We are flying like in an aeroplane. Let’s go down again,” one boy says with abundance of excitement for things he has never experienced before. In the room, I ask for their travel documents to enter their information in the hotel register. They just look at me with total confusion. “I need your passports or identification documents, please,” I explain again. “None of us has any documents. Do we need them?” the eldest in the group answers. This time I look at them with total confusion written all over my face and say, “You just crossed the border. How did you do it without a passport?” They all smile at the same time, as though this were a well-practised act, and say, “God helped us through. Nobody asked us for any documents.” My mind is racing at full speed, and I think, “How will we get them, and the MegaVoices, back into their country without passports?” One young man sees the panic on my face and hands me a very dirty, wrinkled note and says, “Don’t worry. I don’t have a passport, but my father wrote this letter of consent. They will surely accept this at customs and let us through.” My heart skips another beat, but God reminds me of the promise in Hebrews 13:6 “So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?’” (NIV).

After their training, they left without any travel documents and crossed over the border on a three-day train journey. Four times the police stopped them and opened their bags full of MegaVoices, but each time, the police didn’t see anything inside. Confused, they told the boys to close their “empty” bags. Nowhere were the boys asked to present any documents, not even at customs! All the MegaVoices reached their destinations safely, were distributed, and changed many lives.

God is so good!

14: Buying without Money

“Those of you who do not have money,

come, buy”

—Isaiah 55: 1 (NCV)

We have a faith ministry, which means that we trust God for everything we need. So often we don’t have enough money to get through the month, but at the end of the month when we look back, we see that our wallet refused to be empty, that God took care of us. Sometimes He creates, sometimes He provides, and other times He stretches the little we have to last a whole month. He is always faithful. We don’t need money to survive, we need God to survive. In Matthew 6: 33, we read that if we first seek the Kingdom of God, all the other things will be given to us as well.

Sometimes He creates…

As I page through my journal, my eyes catch the following testimony. Relive it with me:

I close the door of our overnight room high in the Himalayas and sit down on the bed. My mouth feels dry, and I nervously lick my lips. “What did we just do?” I ask Hammie. He lights the candle, puts it on the table in front of us, and comes to sit next to me on the bed, saying, “Our mouths often speak something that our ears do not want to hear. Why did we promise to give all the money within three days?” The wind howls as it blows through the cracks in the room. A shiver goes through my body. “Can you believe that this tribe never had an alphabet and that now, for the first time ever, an alphabet has been developed for them? Can you imagine that none of the adults in these valleys can read or write their own language?”, Hammie says. He opens the Bible and continues, “With this new alphabet, for the first time in history, they can translate this Bible into their local language.” I stand up and walk to the small window. It is very dark outside. I respond, “Now, we promised to give the leaders all the money to build a training room for adult literacy in each of the two valleys within three days. That sounds very noble, but where will we get the money in such a short time? We are high in the Himalayas, and we are hours of driving away from the nearest bank.” I am stating the obvious to Hammie just to make sure this is not just a bad dream. “And even if we could reach a bank, we don’t have enough money in our account to build two training rooms,” Hammie replies. For a long time we sit quietly and stare at the flickering candle.

Then the inner voice of our Heavenly Father says to us: “Open your money belts.” (When we travel, we always keep our money in money belts, and at any given point, we know exactly how much money is in them.) We

both open our money belts. In total disbelief, we find a large number of brand-new bills

worth thousands of dollars inside. This money was not there before. “Where did it come from?” We look at each other, then we look again in our money belts, then we look at

each other again, mouths open and eyes

wide in total shock. “Where did all this money come from?” I repeat. “Yes, where did it

come from?” Hammie echoes. We switch on

our flashlights to see better and count the money. As we count it, it multiplies further

and further. Later, our whole bed is full of money. We throw it into the air and let it

rain like confetti over us. I have never seen so much cash before. We drink in the moment. God, our Creator, just created again. He created a whole pile of money on our bed. We count the money; it is enough to build both rooms.

The tribal leaders built and furnished the two rooms and paid teachers for one whole year with that money from our money belts. Soon afterwards, they started adult literacy classes to teach adults to read the Bible in their own language. God is so good!

Does this mean we never stress because we lack funds? No, we do stress, but that happens when we focus on our need and not on our Provider. We all know God is the Provider, our only Source, but often we still look at our bank accounts or our wallets before we make a decision.

Sometimes He provides…

God led us to start foster homes for underprivileged

or neglected children, but He clearly told us not to

ask for the money to run them. He would provide. First we rented houses, but then God showed us

that we must buy the houses for the children. We signed a contract to buy the first house cash, even though we knew we could not guarantee that we had enough money. We shared this information with our committee, but no one else knew about our need for funds because we clearly heard God command us not to share our need. In His time, He would bring the funds to us.

To buy the first house, we needed R580 000 (South African rand) by Monday. That Sunday, we still needed R300 000 (South African rand). Where would we

get the money within twenty-four hours? We knew nobody who had that kind of money, and even if we did, we knew that God did not want us to ask for money. When we started to stress about the money, God prompted us to read Numbers 14: 11: “‘How

long will they not believe me in spite of the miracles I have done among them?” (NCV). We realized that we could trust God; our needs would be easy for

Him to provide for. We started to thank God that

we didn’t have the money, because He says in His Word that we must thank Him in all things. We

thanked Him for being our Provider. All day Sunday we praised and thanked Him. Later that day, someone we barely knew at that time phoned us and said that God had put it in his heart to give us R300 000 (South African rand). Early the next morning, we could pay the full amount for the house in cash. As Frank Gaines said, “Only he who can see the invisible can do the impossible.”

God also led us to buy our second house for the children without any fundraising. We went into the real estate office and signed the contract for the house, agreeing to pay the money within a week. I wrote the following:

My hand trembles as I take the pen to sign

the contract. We commit to pay the full amount for the house in seven days. We don’t have money in our bank account and have no

plan to get it. God is our only plan. The estate agent looks at us over his glasses and says, “I am very nervous to do business with you.” That makes us nervous as well, but we are very sure God has led us to buy this house.

We have seven days to trust God for the money.

Day one:

No money comes in.

Day two:

No money comes in.

Day three:

No money comes in.

Day four:

No money comes in.

The estate agent phones and asks if we have the money. I tell him not to worry. We will get it.

Day five:

No money comes in.

All day we thank God that we don’t have the money and that He can easily make a plan if it is His will for us to buy this house. The more I thank Him, the less I stress.

Day six:

No money comes in.

We check our bank account a couple of times today. Every time, the statement is the same: no money.

Day seven:

Early in the morning, the phone rings. It is a company who wants to make a donation to our NPO (Non Profit Organization). Amazingly, it is the full amount we need for the house. We can also pay cash for our second house!

We also bought a third house by paying cash in the

end without raising funds. We added onto the houses and made a lot of repairs without money. Every morning when we looked at our bank statement,

there was no money in it, but every afternoon when

we needed to pay the builders, the right amount for

the expenses for that day came in. One day we ran

out of paint. We didn’t know how we would be able

to pay for a twenty-litre drum of white paint, but

that day, our neighbour came to us with a twenty-litre drum of white paint to ask if we could use it, as she didn’t want it in her garage anymore. Just at the right time.

So often our logic weakens our faith and places our focus on our lack and not on our Provider. God does not have financial problems.

We can trust our Heavenly Father for big things, but we can also trust Him for small things. Sometimes

we are afraid to bother our Heavenly Father with

the small things. But if the small things matter to

you, then they matter to your Father, because you matter to Him. One time our budget was very tight when one of the girls in our houses asked me

for some earrings. As I walked into a shop that

day to buy something for the houses, I told my

Heavenly Father about this precious girl who wanted earrings. As I paid for the stuff in my shopping

basket, the lady behind the counter told me: “Madam, you just won a prize because today is our shop’s birthday.” The prize was a pair of beautiful earrings for a girl.

Another time when we opened a new house for

foster children, we needed to trust God to provide everything in the house. The caretakers complained that they could not cook because we didn’t have

pots. We and the caretakers knelt down and asked God to please send us pots so that we could cook.

An hour after our prayer, someone came to the

door with a whole set of brand-new pots and asked

us, “Do you maybe need pots for the new house?”

It doesn’t matter if your need is big or small. If it

matters to you, it matters to God, because you matter to God.

Since we began the foster homes, we have never

been without food. However, one time our milk ran

out. That same day, a company phoned us and said, “Our milk truck was in an accident. The milk is not spoilt, but we cannot sell it anymore. Can you use 120 litres of milk?” Another time, a fish factory brought us a truck full of tins of tomato fish. In the load was one batch of chilli fish. When one of the small boys ate the spicy fish, he complained,: “I don’t want to eat this fish. When I bite it, it bites me back.” Over and over God provides what we need just in time. God promised that He will take care of these children, and every month, He does.

When we opened our third house, we had no furniture. We got the keys on Thursday evening and wanted to move in by Monday. After we got the keys, God encouraged us with Deuteronomy 28: 12: “The Lord will open up his heavenly storehouse so that the skies send rain on your land at the right time, and he will bless everything you do” (NCV).

On Friday morning, we opened the door of our new

but empty house and started to clean. “Thank you, Lord, for Your promise in Deuteronomy 28: 12, that

at the right time you will open Your heavenly storehouse,” I prayed while cleaning. A big truck stopped outside our gate, and people carried eight beds, chairs, a fridge, linens, crockery, and household utensils inside. Then another vehicle stopped and someone carried in a washing machine. Within a few hours, the house was fully furnished, beautiful curtains hung in all the windows, the beds were made, and we drank tea out of our new tea set. When I was a small girl I loved playing house, and it still gives me a thrill to do so.

There was still a lot of repair work to be done in the house before we could move in on Monday.

I remembered 1 Chronicles 28: 20-21: “‘Don’t be

afraid or discouraged, because the LORD God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or leave you

until all the work for the Temple of the LORD is finished… . Every skilled worker is ready to

help you with all the work’” (NCV). I took this

Scripture as a promise from God and thanked Him

for the help of the skilled workers He would send

us. That Friday morning, a skilled handyman walked into the house and said, “I took the day off from

work to come and help you.” Thankful, I showed him

all the things that needed to be done. While he was busy, another young man walked in with a drill and

said, “I have come to hang your pictures and paintings.”

By Saturday morning, we had moved in; everything was fixed, and we had everything we needed for the house. As Luke 11: 9 says, “So I tell you, ask, and God will give to you” (NCV).

Sometimes He stretches…

For days we were busy with training in the Himalayas. Christian leaders from persecuted countries came across the borders to a safe place, and we had fellowship together. On the last day of the training, we took the leaders to a Christian bookshop. They had never seen so many Christian books before and indulged in collecting books, mostly Bibles, to take home with them. The only problem was, they didn’t have any money to pay for them. We had to pay, but our budget was very limited. The pile of books on the counter grew, and our friends were

still looking for more to add. “How will we be able

to pay for all this?” Hammie and I asked each other

as we nervously added the price in our heads. Suddenly, we heard God tell us to buy as many

Bibles and other books as our friends wanted. “I will take care of it,” He said. Our limited funds still had

to cover the long journey ahead of us, so logically,

it did not make sense for us to buy all these books.

But in obedience, we bought Bibles and other

literature for our friends and everyone they knew. We paid and went back to our hotel. With a lot of prayer, they returned home with all the Bibles and other materials.

We waited for the next group to arrive for training. On their last day, we also took them to the bookshop. The same thing happened: our friends couldn’t stop adding Bibles to the pile, and again we felt God say, “I will take care of it.” We bought the Bibles and helped the group home. Back in our hotel room, we counted our money and realized we still had nearly the same amount as before we visited the bookshop the first time. God stretched our money. We looked at all the receipts and realized we had spent far less money than our receipts indicated.

If God is your bookkeeper, your books don’t always balance because you can spend money that you don’t have. He can stretch the little you have. If you are willing to give Him your five loaves of bread and two fish, He can multiply them and feed the crowd. God is so good!

15: Everything That I Need

But seek first his kingdom and

his righteousness, and all these things

will be given to you as well.

—Matthew 6: 33 (NIV)

After my time on the border of Afghanistan, I (Alti) felt God call me to go to Cape Town to work with the Logos Church. It was a Sunday night, 9 May 1999, when I walked into my first prayer meeting at the Logos Church. In awe, I listened to the prayer of a young man. I didn’t know who this man was, but I prayed, “Lord, I want a husband who can talk to You like that.” After the prayer meeting, I met the young man: Hammie van Zyl.

After a couple of weeks, I had a prayer burden for Hammie. I prayed for him, for his ministry, and also for a wife for him (at that stage, I didn’t think that I was the answer to my own prayer). Every time I prayed for him, I received Matthew 6: 33: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (NIV). After I received the same Scripture over and over again, I started to read it in different translations to figure out why I kept receiving it. That day, God reminded me that in some of the countries where I had worked, the word Hammie means “all or everything you need”. With a shock, I realized what God was trying to say to me: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and everything that you need (Hammie) will be given to you.” Never before had the word “Hammie” (all or everything that you need) the face of the youth worker in our church.

I kept this information to myself and asked the Lord

to confirm that He was really talking to me about Hammie. He gave me 1 Kings 17: 9 “Go to Zarephath… and live there” (NCV). “But where is Zarephath, Lord?” I asked.

In the meantime, Hammie and I became friends and spent time together. One day, he shared his testimony with me by telling me, “In faith I resigned from my job

as a psychologist and obeyed God’s call to take a

team to Russia on an outreach. As our time in Russia drew to a close, I was sitting on the flat roof of the building one night talking to God. ‘What is your plan for me, Lord? Where must I go from here?’ God answered me clearly with 1 Kings 17: 9, ‘Go to Zarephath… and live there’ (NCV). ‘But where is Zarephath?’ I wondered.”

My heart started to race, and I asked Hammie the same question I had asked God for days: “Where is Zarephath?”

Hammie’s answer unravelled God’s plan for my future: “Back in South Africa, the Logos Church started building a youth centre in faith that God would send them a youth worker before the building was completed. It was nearly completed when I arrived at pastor Christo’s house for a visit. He offered me the job as youth worker. After some prayer, I felt God’s peace and guidance to accept the offer. ‘I did not mention to you before that part of your youth-worker package is that you will receive a house on the church grounds to stay in,’ pastor Christo said after I accepted his offer. Walking to my new house, I discovered that the name of the house was Zarephath, exactly as God said when I asked for His guidance thousands of kilometres away in Russia. I am still living in Zarephath.”

From that day I knew I would marry Hammie, but I didn’t tell him so yet. I waited for God to make the next move. One day I reminded God that I was still waiting. I heard Him tell me clearly, “Just wait a few more days, until 5 August 1999… .”

***

On 27 November 1985, I (Hammie) prayed for a wife for the first time in my life. God answered me from Genesis 29 that I would wait fourteen years for my wife. Of course, I thought I heard wrong—fourteen years was too long to wait!

On 26 February 1995, nearly ten years later, I prayed again for my wife, and God talked to me out of Genesis 24 and Genesis 11, saying that my wife would come out of the land of the Chaldeans. That is now Iraq, and at that time, Alti was living in Iraq. Again I thought I heard wrong.

5 August 1999: Nearly fourteen years after my first prayer for a wife, I went to visit Alti. She was very sick, and I prayed for her. As I prayed, I experienced God telling me that I was praying for my wife. I had been waiting for a wife for nearly fourteen years, but when this happened, I had such a great fright that I just left her to seek the Lord’s face. God confirmed the message in His Word and through different people within days. Fourteen years after my first prayer for a wife, Alti and I stood at the pulpit and got married. The fourteen-year wait was worth it.

God knows what we need and when to give it to us. He does not always give us what we ask for, but He always gives us everything that we need. After our marriage, God started to talk to us about Benjamin. We both thought this would be our son, but years after we got married, we received the bad news that we would never be able to have children of our own. That was devastating to us. “Lord, what about Benjamin?” we asked Him. We felt Him answer us, “Benjamin is not a child; it is the name of your project with many children. I want you to raise up a Benjamin generation of end-time leaders.”

That reminded me (Alti) of grade nine in school; the year I wrote my first business plan for a children’s project. For years afterwards I was too busy to think about it again. I worked overseas, and somewhere along the way I just put this dream on ice. In 2008, I went to listen to my good friend Maria speak to a group of women about their unfulfilled dreams. Immediately I thought back to my grade-nine dream and realized that after twenty-five years, I still wanted to start a home for children. We asked God to confirm if this dream was from Him.

It came when Hammie and I were at the wedding of our dear friends, Marius and Lois. We were standing

in line waiting for our food when Hammie started to

make small talk with the stranger in front of us by

asking, “How are you today?” The stranger replied,

“Not good. I have been praying for the last ninety days, and God has not answered my prayer. I trusted Him to send a couple who can work with orphans and neglected children in South Africa. Today is the last day of my ninety day prayer and still I have not met such a couple.” We smiled from ear to ear and told him of our prayer to start homes for such children. That jump-started our project. We then registered, got a house, and waited for our first child to come. Today we have three houses in Cape Town for children who need foster care or who have been orphaned. I love them like my own and spend all my time with them. If we had our own family it would be very difficult to spend enough time with the children in the homes and to also be there for our own kids. We recently expanded the project to Asia and are excited by what God is doing with it.

God took a very bad situation in our life, our barrenness, and changed it into a wonderful and fulfilling ministry. Again He gave me everything that I need. God is good, all the time.

16: Supernatural Connections

“For nothing is impossible with God.”

—Luke 1: 37 (NIV)

On our way to work among a tribe in the Himalayas, we needed to drive through an army camp before setting off on our hike. Our guide went to speak to the army officer in charge; from our jeep, we saw the officer shake his head. Our guide came back with the news that the officer didn’t want us to go through this area. We would have to phone for special permission from the head office, but there were no telephones and it is impossible to get any cell phone signal in this area surrounded by the highest mountains in the world. We told our guide that we would pray to Jesus for a special cell phone signal. When we said amen, the cell phone had a strong signal, and with wide eyes, the guide phoned and got the necessary permissions. That convinced him that we served the true God, and we shared with him about Jesus. Whenever we reached a town on the hike, we learned that the story of the cell phone signal had reached the town before us, and people came to hear that story again. That opened many doors for us to tell much better stories about Jesus and the cross.

Nothing is impossible with God!

We needed someone to go and work as missionary among one of the tribes living in the Himalayas in Nepal. This tribe lived in very difficult circumstances at high altitude. We were only in the Himalayas for a short time, so we decided not to look for someone, but trusted that God would bring the right person to us. One evening after training some Christian leaders, we went to a restaurant with a man from India, who introduced us to a friend of his from Australia. We shared about our burden for this tribe in the mountains, and the man from Australia introduced us to a lady who had just arrived from Japan. She then introduced us to a man from Tibet who had been praying for years to work among this specific tribe in the mountains of Nepal. Finding the right person was like putting together a puzzle: South Africa → India → Australia → Japan → Tibet = a missionary for Nepal. Soon after that night of networking, this man from Tibet started the ministry among these remote people, and many of this tribe met Jesus.

Nothing is impossible with God!

I (Hammie) and my team were on our way to Russia for an outreach. Through a stream of unforeseen events, we all had to pay for our plane tickets and other travel expenses within three days. I only had a mere 200 South African rand (less than 30 US dollars) in the bank. “How and where will I get such a large amount of money in such a short amount of time?” I thought. I prayed and trusted God to provide. On the third day, I still had no money. Later that morning, one of my friends came to me with the following news:

A Christian lady whom I have still never met, was travelling through America. She had planned a day of shopping, but the night before, she had a dream in which Jesus told her, “Do not spend the money on shopping. There is someone in South Africa who needs to take a team to Russia, and he is in need of the money.” In her dream, she received a number. She woke up from this vivid dream and realized that the number, which was still fresh in her memory, was a telephone number. In obedience to Jesus’ command, she telephoned and reached my friend, who was busy organizing the outreach. After hearing the lady’s story, he said, “Yes, I know that man. His name is Hammie.” The amount she deposited into the bank account was the exact amount I still needed to pay.

Nothing is impossible with God!

We got the name of one of the few Christians of a tribe in the Himalayas. We didn’t know him, but we wanted to go and meet him and fellowship with him. We only knew his name and the name of his town, but not his address. We didn’t want to stop and ask people where he lived, because we didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to our visit, so we drove and drove and trusted God to help us. Later, we decided we had to ask someone. We saw a man coming out to the road, and we stopped and very cautiously asked him, “Do you maybe know Iyan?” “I am Iyan,” the man replied. We spent the rest of the day together in wonderful fellowship. He shared with us that he had felt the prompting of the Holy Spirit to come at that exact time from the mountain to the road where he met us. After that day, he attended our training sessions, and we worked together to spread the good news of Jesus Christ in his valley.

Nothing is impossible with God!

At another time, we sat in a town high in the mountains where Christianity was not allowed. For days we walked in prayer in this spiritually dark area and interceded for the lost people of this tribe.

The signs of idolatry were evident everywhere. Blood splattered on the pathways testified to a multitude

of sacrifices to false gods. “God, please show us if

there are any Christians among these people,”

we prayed as we went to rest on a wooden bench outside a small shop. A small boy hanging over the rail of the shop’s veranda asked in poor English, “You Christian?” With a big smile on my face, I replied, “Yes, and you?” His face lit up, and I could see he understood my question. He whispered: “Me take you”. He took us on a five hour walk over a very high mountain pass to meet the pastor and the only group of believers. With joy we met each other and had secret fellowship together. They were only a handful of believers, but they had an enormous need for Bibles and other Christian literature. We gladly helped them with that need as well as other projects we planned in excitement together.

Nothing is impossible with God!

I wrote the following in my journal:

We are all sitting squeezed in the only shade in our camp site after our first day’s hike to K2, the second highest mountain in the world. The sun’s reflection is hot and blinds us. We are sunburnt and very thirsty. A group of Balti men come to sit with us and try to make small talk in their local language, Balti. I sit and listen to their strange language but don’t understand a word of it. Suddenly, I start to understand what they’re saying. I think at first that they have switched to English, but then I realize that I can answer them in a language I do not know. What is going on? My mouth speaks words which my brain doesn’t formulate. Amazed, I share the gospel with them in this language that I have never heard or spoken before. One man says to our guide, “She can speak Balti; she speaks my language.” That opens a door to the hearts of these people. They bring their sick to us for healing, and God gives us favour with them so we can explain more about Jesus and hand out MegaVoices.

Nothing is impossible with God!

One year when we visited the Himalayas, winter weather arrived early and caught everyone off guard. The roads were all closed, and we needed to catch a plane out of the mountains before the weather worsened, but the plane was fully booked. The aeroplanes there only flew in good weather and hardly ever in the winter. Everyone rushed to the airport to get a seat on the last flight out before winter.

We drove in an open jeep to the airport. The snow of the last couple of days chilled the air and froze my face. I pulled my scarf higher over my mouth and nose and held on with my other hand as the road made a sharp bend. The driver barely managed to avoid going over the cliff. In the distance I could see the airport. We drove past a man who was running towards the airport. Everyone wanted a seat on the only plane leaving that day because if they didn’t fly out that day, they might stay in these valleys for a very long winter. We stopped and offered the man a lift. Thankful, he climbed into the jeep. It didn’t make sense for us to pick him up since we would be fighting for seats on the plane already. “Why should we pick up someone who might take one of our places?” I asked Hammie.

When we reached the airport, the queue for the extra seats on the flight was very long, and we realized we would probably miss the flight. However, we queued up and waited for the large blue doors of the building to open. When they did, the man we had given a lift came walking through these doors. We discovered that he was in charge of the airport. He looked over the crowd until his eyes met ours, and he gestured for us to come. He booked us in first and we entered the plane first.

Nothing is impossible with God!

During another trip, a brother living in a Himalayan country pleaded with us to bring many Bibles the next time we visited, but we had no idea what his or his church’s addresses were so that we could deliver them, and we had no other contact details for him.

After we entered the country on our next visit, we booked into our hotel, where we took out all the Bibles we had packed and thanked God that we had passed through customs safely. “Lord, where must we deliver these Bibles?” we asked as we got into a taxi and started to drive, hoping that God would direct us as we went. The taxi driver stopped many times and asked, “Where do you want to go to?” Still not knowing where to God directed us, we replied every time, “Just keep on driving.” After some time, the taxi driver stopped again, but this time he shouted angrily, “Where do you want to go to?” At that moment, a stranger put his head through the window of the vehicle and asked, “Are you looking for the church? Follow me.” He led us to the believers who had gathered at that moment in a secret church. We handed out the Bibles and looked at their thankful faces as they hugged the Bibles, a precious gift from the hand of God.

Nothing is impossible with God!

The Brokpas live in a restricted area, and no foreigners can enter their valleys. We felt God lead us to the town nearest the Brokpas and tell us to wait there. The journey there was long, and after many hours of travel, we reached the last town where foreigners were allowed. From there, we still had a three-day hike over the mountains to reach the Brokpas, but we were not allowed to go any further.

We walked around in the eerie, spiritually dark town. The smell of death hovered in the air. Hungry and sick dogs lay everywhere dying. Nobody greeted us. We were looking for any sign of the Brokpas, but we found none. These people wore a particular kind of hat which we knew whereby to identify them. We asked around, but everyone told us the same thing: “The Brokpas don’t come to this town; they just stay in their valleys.” We kept on walking through the streets, but we could not see how this would help us to reach out to the Brokpas. As we walked and wondered what God’s plan was, someone came to us and told us, “Something very strange has happened. All the Brokpa leaders and their spiritual leader have just arrived in town.”

God worked in the hearts of these leaders (even though they didn’t know God), and they started to walk three days before to reach the town at the same day we arrived. We went to meet them and invited them for a meal. We spent quality time together. Since that day, the Brokpas had the opportunity to hear the good news on several occasions.

Nothing is impossible with God!

We invited the Christian leaders of another tribe we worked among to a safe town for a week of training. They never received our second letter, which gave the address of our hotel in a town of two million people sixteen hours’ drive from their home. They came in faith although they didn’t know where to find us, and we went to the hotel without knowing whether they would find us. We walked around in the crowded streets, trusting God to show us to them. As we walked, one of these leaders was sitting in a room on the third floor, and out of the window he saw someone with a bald head in the crowded street below. Hammie was the only person with a bald head that he knew, so he ran down to us and brought us to the rest of the group. Soon after that, the training started.

Nothing is impossible with God!

I (Hammie) stood on the well-known Charles Bridge in Prague watching an artist who was busy sketching a tourist. This artist had grabbed my attention immediately because nothing he drew looked even remotely like the tourist in front of him. In fact, it did not even look like the face of a person. “He will be in big trouble today; the tourist will surely not buy this drawing,” I thought. Curious of what the tourist’s reaction would be, I stayed to watch. But within the last few minutes, the drawing developed like a photograph in a dark room, and suddenly a perfect likeness of the tourist appeared on the sketch pad. I was astounded by what I had witnessed. Then the artist explained what he had done. He first drew all the shadows in the tourist’s face, after that it was easy and quick to just fill in the rest.

I don’t have the eye of a master artist. I could not understand what he was doing; I did not even see any shadows on the tourist’s face. But the artist, with the trained eye of a master, saw everything clearly. From out of the shadows, he sketched his masterpiece.

When God called us to the twelve tribes in the Himalayas, it was like the artist sketching this picture. In the beginning, it didn’t make sense at all because He was busy drawing the shadows, but then the whole picture fell into place; the puzzle was complete. We learnt over the years that if you can’t see something in the natural world, walk by faith and not by sight.

A month before I (Alti) planned to leave the mission field to return to South Africa, our landlord told us to evacuate the house we were renting immediately. We had no choice. I really complained to God because I had planned so many last meetings and didn’t have time to move to another house. The team needed a house after I left. Therefore we had to move. Getting a house, packing, moving, and then unpacking and settling into the new house took up most of my last month. God is always greater than our problem, and He will change our situation to work out for the best in the end.

I saw this happen again in the following story. Each week I met with a group of young girls and shared Jesus with them. After we moved into the new house, I sent them each a note to invite them for our last session before I left for South Africa. In that note, I also gave our new address: house number 12. They arrived at house number 12 and knocked on the door. I quote what happened next from my journal:

We all sit in our sitting room and watch a video of the evangelist Billy Graham in their own language, but I see that Mia, a wonderful girl who does not know Jesus, is not interested in the video. She looks around, opens her handbag and fiddles in it, then goes for a drink of water, comes back, and looks around her again. After about thirty minutes, I tell her, “The video is nearly finished. Please just listen for a few more minutes.” That makes her watch with more interest. Then, suddenly, Billy Graham looks straight into the camera and says, “You there in house number 12, maybe today is your day to give your life to Jesus.” Shocked, she looks at me and asks hoarsely, “Is he talking to me?” “Well, you are in house number 12, and you have not given your life to Jesus yet,” I replied. She starts to cry in repentance and gives her life to Jesus.

I could have chosen any video that day, but God wanted us to watch that specific one because he knew Billy Graham used house number 12 as an example. I felt sorry that I had complained about moving to house number 12. God had a bigger plan. He is the God of supernatural connections. He lets everything fit together like a puzzle so that in the end His Kingdom advances; His will be done!

17: Running with Horses

And you will know that God’s power is

very great for us who believe. That power

is the same as the great strength God used

to raise Christ from the dead.

—Ephesians 1: 19-20 (NCV)

In 2007 God called us to go to a Himalayan tribe who had never accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ. They lived high up in the mountains, but at that stage, I was very sick. A local Christian told me, “Please, madam, do not go. We don’t even go there because the hike is too difficult. Your body is too sick and too weak. You will not make it.” But we rented some horses to carry our camping gear and planned to leave for the seven-day hike. The memory of this hike is still fresh in my mind as recorded in my journal:

I am vomiting throughout the trip in the taxi from the airport. My whole body feels weak and feverish. I lie in our overnight room and don’t even have the strength to get up to go to the bathroom. “God, how can I make this hike?” God leads us to Ephesians 1: 19-20 and explains to us that the same power that raised Jesus from the grave is at work in us. To make this hike would be like a small ant pushing a big truck up a steep hill. It seems totally impossible. I am like that small ant, but with His power in me, I can do all things.

The next morning on our way to the starting point for the hike, I am still very weak and without any energy. “Lord, today I feel like that small ant pushing a truck uphill. My sick, weak body cannot walk on its own strength over these very tough mountains.” I climb out of the vehicle and pick up my backpack. After forty minutes, we understand why nobody wants to go to this tribe. The hike is tough, and my body rebels against the steep hill. “Lord, if You don’t help me, I cannot go on,” I keep on praying. As I walk, I start to realize that a power greater than my own works inside me. For the first time in my life, I understand Ephesians 1: 19-20. The more we walk and the tougher it gets, the less I feel tired. Later in the day an energy rush overwhelms me. I feel so strong that I literally run in front of the horses and don’t get tired at all.

During that hike, God wrote the lesson of Ephesians 1: 19-20 deep in my heart. That helped me over many slippery mountain trails and through many tough times, when leeches sucked everywhere on my body, when dangerous bears came to our tent at night, when we hiked through daily rain in mouldy wet clothes, when we struggled with high altitude sickness, and in many other difficulties. Even though I am only a weak clay pot, I have a great Treasure inside me Who gives me strength to press on.

After that hike, our Christian contacts in the country said, “If you could make it with your weak body, we can do it also.” Since that hike, local Christians often went to these people, and they planted a small church there.

One of the children’s homes we bought has its own well with good water, but we don’t have a water pump and therefore use very expensive municipality water for our gardens instead of the free water out of our own well. The moment we connect a water pump to the well, we will be able to use unlimited free water and our gardens can look like Eden. The water in the well is already ours (we bought the well along with the property) we must just start to use it. When we became Christian, salvation was just the first benefit we received. Many Christians live a saved life but a poor life because they don’t use everything that already belongs to them: they don’t tap into the Well of Life.

During that difficult hike to the remote tribe, I hurt both my knees and walked very slowly with the aid of two sticks. That day we had to cross a very high mountain, and our guide told us it would take hours if we had to continue at that pace. I wrote the following in my journal:

I take the next step. Pain radiates through my body. I have to go on. Then I take the next step. “O, God, please help me!” Suddenly the power of Christ takes hold of both of us and we start to run. My legs keep on running. I don’t feel any pain. I don’t feel tired. We keep on running faster and faster. I look at Hammie and ask, “What is happening to us? This is amazing!” Within minutes we cross the high mountain, and a few seconds later we are already down on the other side. With the power of Christ in us, we miraculously run over the mountain, free, without any effort, without any discomfort. We reach our destination hours before the estimated time and wait for a long time before the guide and horses catch up with us.

During one of our hikes to an unevangelized tribe, we walked for days before we reached our destination and had to enter through a huge ancient gate. We stopped at the gate and sang, “Open the gate that the King of Glory may come in.” While we sang, we saw a procession coming through the town towards the gate. At the front people sang and danced, and some of the people were dressed exceptionally well. We who had hiked for days were very dirty and stood aside so that they could pass us. I captured the moment in my journal as follows:

The pathway is filled with people. I get out of the way so that they can pass me. A group of ladies in colourful clothes lead, singing and dancing. They are followed by some men in very fancy long dresses. I am fascinated by the rich material of their clothes. I am tired after the long hike, my hair is dirty, and I surely do not smell fresh in the humid weather. My trousers are full of blood where leeches sucked at my legs. I am definitely not dressed for this occasion.

A very well-dressed lady riding a decorated horse stops next to me. When she climbs

off her horse, all the people around her bow down to her. I realize she is the queen of

the country, who (we heard from the locals)

very seldom stops to talk to bystanders. She walks up to me and asks, “Who are you?” Amazed by my own words, I tell her, “I am princess Alti, and we come to bless you in the name of our Father, the King of all kings.” She thanks us and bows before us in acknowledgement and respect of our Father, the King of all kings. She welcomes us to her country and leaves through the gate with her earthly kingdom. We enter through the same gate with His Kingdom and take His light into their darkness and change eternity for some of these lost people. The gate to this group is now open for the King of Glory to go in, just as we sang.

Through all our hikes in the Himalayas, I learnt not to allow my body to dictate my spirit. My body, full of tumours at that stage, wanted to stay home, but my spirit decided to make a trust jump, which is when you don’t have a back-up plan and only God can help you through the situation.

I heard a story of a father who came home to see his house in flames. Smoke came out of the windows and fire was everywhere. Then he saw his boy standing in the second-storey window. The boy was terrified. The father called to him, “Jump, I will catch you!” But the boy yelled back, “I can’t see you, Father. The smoke is too thick.” “Just jump,” the father replied, “because I can see you!” Sometimes our Heavenly Father wants to tell us, “Just jump, because I can see you!” When you dare to make a trust jump on God’s command, you always end up safely in your Heavenly Father’s arms.

When you feel that God has called you to do a task far beyond your human ability, I encourage you to make a trust jump with us. Trust God to do the impossible. In the process, you might get hurt, you might get a few more grey hairs, but you will surely get a thrill out of it, because a life with the King is a life of abundance.

Ready, steady, jump!

Table of Contents

God IS good

Copyright

Contents

1: Taste and See

2: God Is GOOD

3: Is It Worth It?

4: I Am Not Alone

5: Much-Afraid Went to War

6: There Will Always Be Another Mountain

7: In the Midst of the Storm

8: Through the Storm

9: You Are Important to God

10: Who Will Roll the Stone Away?

11: God Will Open the Door

12: He Is Our Healer

13: Under the Shelter of His Wings

14: Buying without Money

15: Everything That I Need

16: Supernatural Connections

17: Running with Horses