Stories from today

Last year I used to pray at the healing rooms in my city. It is really just a place that is open for a few hours once a week or so, where Christians are available to pray for people who want prayer. For healing, or anything really. Its pretty cool, mostly because God actually heals people. A few weeks ago some ladies I know prayed for a lady who was blind, and God healed her, and now she can see. For serious.

Anyway I was out of town for quite a few months this year so I got taken off the healing rooms roster, and I haven't got it together to get myself involved again since I got back. But in the interim a new healing room has been opened in my city, in an informal settlement on an old dump site closish to where I live.

So I thought I'd go pray there this week. I've only been there once before so I wasn't quite sure how to get there. I kindof found the place on google maps (tricky because dumps don't have street numbers!), I drove down there, but at some point you turn off the suburby tar road onto a dirt road, that continues for a few hundred metres through a bushy area, then you get to the dump.

So I turned onto the dirt road, and drove past a guy in the road. He tried to get my attention, but I was a bit nervous to slow down and roll my window down because there was no one else around, and... well, you know. Bad things have happened to girls in bushy areas not far from there. Anyway so I carried on driving and pretended not to notice him, but this guy was persistent, he started running after my car shouting "sisi, sisi!"

I don't know if its some sort of white guilt thing or what, but I feel terrible when I treat people rudely because I am afraid they might do something to me. I saw a few people further down the road and figured that probably made it safer, so I stopped and rolled down the window. And the guy came up to the window and said "sisi, you don't want to go this way, this road goes to a dump!"

Lol, so the poor dude was running after my car trying to warn me! Shame!

Anyway, the lady who leads the prayer room went to visit a couple of people in the settlement before the prayer room time, among them the lady who God healed of blindness a few weeks ago.

I didn't go into the lady's home, it was a shack and too small for everyone to squeeze in to. So I just waited outside. But while I was waiting I noticed the she had put up shelves on the front of her house with pot plants on them, and she had hung up a sun hat as decoration, and she had put up these decorative metal... I don't know what they are called, but the curley metal corner shapes you might find maybe in the front veranda of an old style house.

The flower pots were all broken, and the metal curley bits were just tied on with bright red chord. But the style of decor reminded me of my gran, those sort of pretty ornate touches.

So anyway, this story has no point, it was just something that struck me. I guess I could say it made me sad, that this lady living in a shack, on a dump site where the ground is a mulch of soil and rubbish and it is always wet, that she made her house pretty with broken things. I guess I could say I was amazed at that woman, or humbled. But I don't know really.