00:00So I'm in South Africa on this mission trip, and volunteering at this local preschool inside a town called Kaisands, we're in Johannesburg. And this is, Kaisands, on the other side of town, there's this informal settlement. And informal settlement is just pretty much where people just, like, gravitate at some other countries and just start building shacks and tents, and this is just where they live. It's in the midst of all of this, this huge trash heap, and it's just, it's by far the lowest poverty I've ever seen in person, in my life. And we're volunteering at this preschool all week, and then we had went out to, like, left out from the encampment of the preschool and actually walked through the community. And walking through the community, one of the people in our group, shout out Heather, she, I think we all were just kind of, like, all struck at just, like, the level of just lowly and just poverty that we were seeing. And, like, even to the point where, like, they don't have their own bathroom, so they kind of had, like, this makeshift area that they have, you know, put bathrooms in or whatever, put toilets in. And, like, an old community shares, like, this four or five bathrooms or whatever, or at least this portion of it did anyway, and it's, like, 70,000 people in this community we're in. So it's massive. And walking through a portion of the community, and Heather, she was, she shared with us that she was talking, like, she just kind of had a moment where she was, like, God, like, what is this? Like, how, how are these people living like this? Like, they don't even have bathrooms, right? And was just, like, pitying the people there. She said that the Holy Spirit just so quietly just whispered toward her, was, like, these people are fine. I have them where I want them. Jesus didn't have a bathroom. And when she shared that with us, the way that it hit me, it's, like, it was, like,
02:38revelation in his mind. Like, I was just, like, caught off guard by the poverty. And naturally, you lean into pity when you're seeing people in such, like, degenerate, like, level of life. It's just, I don't know. It's, it's a lot to see up close, man. But in the, after she shared that with us, I was reminded of a verse in Matthew, Matthew chapter 8, verse 20. So Jesus said to him, the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. When she had told God, she was, like, these people don't even have bathrooms. She said the Holy Spirit was, like, Jesus doesn't have a bathroom, right? And in that moment, it just kind of clicked to me, where our natural lean in this was to pity them and to, like, feel sorry for them, right? There's actually something so beautiful here. So many things that we'll see in Scripture, when you see Jehovah Rapha, Jehovah Nissi, Jehovah Rapha, this is the God who heals. Unless you've actually been healed by God, or he's healed someone, like, that you love, that you're close to, you read that, you may believe it, but you don't know it intimately. Like, you don't, you don't have, like, a shared, like, you can't genuinely, I don't know, like, you can't relate to it the way that somebody else who God has healed can relate to him as a healer. You just, it's, like, you just don't know him intimately in that way. And as I'm thinking about, like, processing this, like, right, with these people in these conditions, living the way that they're living, that is very similar and parallel to the way Jesus lived. I'm, like, God, they get access to know you in a way most of us don't like there's something so like you've hidden something in this in the midst of all of this