Zhiras story

I am a pastor a shepherd, a caregiver, a spiritual director, kind of a guy. It's my calling, but it's also who I am and what I do. As such there are days that the stories I hear are simply overwhelming to me. It seems that many nights I go home saying, "That's it, I just heard it all, there isn't anything anymore that can shock me, surprise me or hurt me."

And then comes another day with another story, like yesterday.

Her name doesn't matter and her story isn't secret, but it happens hundreds of times a year. The only difference is that these stories happen far away, in another land. Far away from where I live. Her story began in East Africa, Somalia to be exact. Now, she has brought her story to us, she worships with us here at Gateway.

Six years ago and half a world away, her and her husband and seven children were trying to live through difficult times. She was a nurse and her husband ran his own business in town and they were doing ok.

One day without warning, armed men burst into her home and began shooting. Her husband was killed right in front of her, and she tried to hide four of their children behind her back but the gunmen began shooting at her too. She was hit a number of times, but as the men moved on through the house, she got her four little ones out the back door, while her sister-in-law ran out the front door with the younger three children. She's never seen them since.

Over the next seven days they were able to reach the next town, becoming beggars because they had nothing to eat. She met a friend of her husbands who took care of her and they lived in a tent, begging, scraping to get by. Eventually she married him.

All the while they tried to find the three lost children, always searching and never finding any answers.

One day a government official came to town, looking for families in trouble. Her little family passed all the tests and she and her four children were shipped off to Prince Albert, Canada. Her new husband remained behind and continued searching for the three lost children.

When she arrived in Canada, she received word that the three had been found alive and were with her husband.

Shortly after that, in January 2001, she received the news that her boy and one girl had died of the flu, five days apart, and that her 10 year old girl was very sick, but had recovered.

And now, the latest word is that her husband and the eleven year old girl are living on the streets as beggars, because they have nothing and no place to live.

I will go home tonight and sit at a table of food with my family all around and wonder at the amazing grace that happened to me, that I should be born half a world away, and that if I lived a hundred of these lives, I would never know the level of pain and loss that my friend has known during her 30 short years on this unfair planet.