Yesterday, we were truly blessed at the Zavora Doctors for Life Clinic. A routine visit to a larger hospital to get malaria tests and treatment yielded a 60kg box of medicine being donated to the clinic. We got everything you could imagine! Antibiotics, pain pills, eye ointment, bandages; you name it we got it! On the side of the box one can see that the medicine has been donated from a Belgium donor and it is such a blessing. It has been very interesting for me to be on the receiving end of donations. Personally over the past 2 years I have gone from being a person who had more than enough; who donated my old clothing, sponsored a child in Africa, and gave the odd coin to a homeless person… to being the one who receives these item and how blessed I have been to have been humbled to this place.

I was speaking with the young man (25years) who lives permanently at the clinic with his wife and young baby. They are African/Dutch missionaries from South Africa and this young man has really had a wonderful upbringing with both his parents present, a large Christian family with true Christian values and he has been a source of wisdom for me. He was talking to me about humility and he said, “you must be willing to humiliate yourself”. English is not his first language, so I thought it was a slip in words, yet I felt it was quite relevant to what humility really is…

we must be willing to humiliate ourselves…

When I was back home for 6 months after being in Africa for 10 months, I recall a time when I was at the house of two good friends. I asked them each if they had any unused cosmetics, an old lipstick they were not using or some crème? Low and behold I was so blessed and to this day(thanks Bets) I still am using my ‘donated’ eyeliner. Was I humiliated to ask this request, “hey guys I don’t have much money and you may have what I need and could easily part with it…could you possible offer it up to me?”

Sometimes over the past two years I have been ‘humiliated’ to ask for help, yet it has further humbled me and brought me to a place of compassion and understanding that I could never have gained otherwise. As I look forward to just 27 days left in Africa, I am excited to start my life anew in North America, yet to start I will not have many things and even as I get a job and start to get established I desire the most to stay humble, to be willing to be ‘humiliated’ AND most of all to continue to give to those in need out of the abundance that I know I will have!

Are you willing to be humiliated today?

What does humility look like to you?