Always Enough: God's Miraculous Provision among the Poorest Children on Earth

Introduction

I (Rolland) always wanted to believe and live the Sermon on the Mount, but I was usually told that it did not mean all that I thought it meant and that I needed to be practical. I would read the Scriptures longingly, trying to imagine how wonderful it would be not to worry about anything, safe and secure in the presence of Jesus all the time. Miracles would be normal. Love would be natural. We could always give and never lose. We could be lied to, cheated and stolen from, and yet we would always come out ahead. We would never have to take advantage of anyone or have any motive but to bless other people. Rather than always making contingency plans in case Jesus didn’t do anything, we could count on Him continually. We, our lives and all that we preach and provide would not be for sale, but would be given freely, just as we have received freely. Our hearts would be carefree in the love of our Father in heaven, who always knows what we need, and we could get on with the glorious business of seeking first His Kingdom and His righteousness. There would always be enough!

In time I realized that the worst possible fate would be to miss all of this. And so I began reading every book and drawing from every ministry I could that would help me live out the desire of my heart in God. Being raised in a Pentecostal missionary family gave me a huge head start. A tremendous formative boost came from my grandfather, who told me endless stories of revival, revelation and supernatural power encounters from his many years among the poor in remote China. His book, Visions Beyond the Veil, has influenced my whole life. While I was growing up I became familiar with the missionary classics, the biographies of early pioneers with great faith. I read the sermons of Charles Spurgeon, My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers and the miraculous story of God’s provision for George Muller’s orphanage in England. David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade showed me more of what was possible. And I hungrily read modern accounts of revival, such as Mel Tari’s Like a Mighty Wind.

Giving up a scholarship and career in science, I got my B.A. and M.A. in biblical studies at a Christian college, a valuable foundation. But in God’s mercy and grace I received as much encouragement in faith from my friend and gym manager Bob Zuver as I did from any academic course or book. Bob was a prophet, struck down and blinded for three days when he was called by the Holy Spirit through a Damascus road experience. He hid away from public ministry and ran a gym and weight-lifting equipment business until he withdrew to full-time personal counseling. But his whole life was an example of faith working through love. To Bob God was sovereign and strong, His ways and wisdom past finding out without revelation. He had no use for business as usual in the Church. By grace God could be known, trusted and followed, and powerful miracles could be a normal, daily occurrence. He used the strength business to illustrate life in God. Regularly, almost daily, I witnessed great physical and financial miracles in his life. God also spent many years softening his heart and soothing his spirit until, in all his strength, he became meek and gentle, able to diffuse terrible attacks and injustice brought against him. He is one more model of what is possible in God, a living embodiment of the Sermon on the Mount.

I began to exercise faith, and my mistakes were mixed in with beautiful victories. Faith involves knowing God well enough to know what He wants, and that requires grace, revelation and experience as well as knowledge of His Word. But I was excited and there was no going back. I was not concerned so much about what job I had as whether I had enough time to pray and seek Him. I had to live by faith. I could not disconnect from Him for anything. All I wanted was to love Him and feel His love. He could do with me what He pleased and send me anywhere.

Until I met Heidi, I had no close ministry partner with whom I could share a daring faith. I participated in the Jesus Movement of the 1970s in California and was deeply involved in large churches. But eventually I lost interest in big gatherings, huge concerts and constant socializing. I was willing to go to the smallest, most obscure meetings, if only the Holy Spirit would show up and touch me in increasingly powerful ways. I began to attend Dana Point Community Chapel, a church of two hundred near the beach in southern California. I was attracted by the glory of the Holy Spirit’s work there.

On a church ski trip to the High Sierras, I happened to sit next to a short, very cute blonde girl and got to know her better. I had seen her often in our little church and was always impressed by her gift of prophecy. She was obviously intimate with Jesus, even as a teenager, and I could see she had a fiery determination to serve God. Every weekend and vacation she was out on the streets preaching or taking teams on mission trips, and she trusted God for every detail of provision. Her testimonies in church were powerful. Now God put me right next to her, and we talked for hours to and from Mammoth. Later I visited her at her college, and then at her home in Laguna Beach.

I hardly thought of taking her out to dinner or a movie. In her presence I was completely caught up in the things of God, and that’s all we talked about. I joined her on an Easter mission trip to a poor community of local Hawaiians on the north shore of Oahu and saw her gift of leadership. Mostly I was moved by her childlike love for God, a pure, emotional force that overruled all other passions in her life. She could sing, and she worshiped with her voice at every opportunity. When I approached her house to see her again, I could hear songs of love float out of the window to her bedroom, where she would be on her knees with hands raised before her Jesus by the hour.

She knew God’s voice, and He most often spoke to her as she worshiped. She was connected to Him in a rare and beautiful way. I began to love this girl whose heart so valued all the things that were important to me as well. I knew I could minister together with her, and I could travel with her and depend on the Lord with her for everything. But I was twelve years older than she was. And I was even a friend of her ex-fiancé, whom she had broken up with at the Lord’s direction because he didn’t have the same call on his life. But, amazingly to me, Jesus was bringing Heidi and me closer and closer together, until I realized that God intended us to be together for life and serve Him with one heart and spirit. I didn’t know until I asked Heidi to marry me that He had already told her what would happen. In fact, He had spoken to her with an audible voice while she was on a mission trip to Mexico City when she still wasn’t sure of my last name!

Two weeks after we were married in 1980, Heidi and I left for Indonesia as missionaries with a one-way ticket and a few dollars in our pockets. Our honeymoon was a last-minute miracle of provision. Every detail of our preparation was equally miraculous. We were naive and had so much to learn, but we felt a very great joy in depending on our God alone, a feeling that we have never lost all these years. We have tried never to put pressure on anyone but God for our needs. We wanted to minister to the poor in the power of God and be able to bring His relief for their fears. Now, many years later, with much more responsibility, we still delight in putting our pressures on Him. We pray with all our hearts that our lives and work will not seem a burden to our friends and supporters, but that you will be thrilled and encouraged along with us by God’s goodness. May we encourage each other in our faith until we all learn to trust our fabulous God in every way. We want Him to feel loved in everything we think, feel and do.

Jesus developed our faith over the years in many countries and ministry situations for a reason. Today He has given us over five thousand churches to care for in one of the poorest areas of the world. We live in Mozambique, in the southeast corner of Africa, a land that has suffered horribly from decades of warfare and natural disaster. Finally the people are desperate for Jesus and no other. Revival is spreading. In large sections of central Mozambique and southern Malawi, we have simple mud-hut churches in virtually every village. They grow until there are as many as can hear the sound of a preacher’s voice. More are being added continuously, and now others in countries around us are calling for ministry and help, desperate to be a part of this fire. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is enough for them all. He is good and faithful, the Master Lover. They just want Him. They have been poor and wretched, but now they possess all things in Him. We dare to approach them, we dare to preach to them, we dare to pick up the helpless, abandoned and dying, because He died for us and rose again on our behalf. We eat and drink from His body and blood, and as a result, there will always be enough.

Chapter 1

The Children No One Wanted

Heidi! I (Rolland) called. You want a mission field? Listen to this! They’re blowing up Red Cross trucks in Mozambique! I was reading Time magazine’s coverage of the civil war there, and I couldn’t believe such evil. Oh! she called back. Let’s go there! They need help!

That began our story in the world’s poorest country, one that lost everything by trying to take what it wanted by force. We were in Hong Kong in the late 1980s, preaching to the poor and homeless in back alleys. We were going to London to study for our doctorate degrees in theology and plant another church among the homeless. But Mozambique stuck in our hearts. It was hopeless. It was bloody, broken and at the bottom of the heap.

We had been working in the big cities of Asia, places with huge economies and massive infrastructures. But we were restless. We knew there were poorer places, more impossible places, places with even less hope. Jesus! we prayed. Send us as far as You want! Send us anywhere! But we want to go to the poorest of the poor, to the ‘least of these.’ We want to see your Gospel tested and proven where nothing else can work!

And then for a few years no matter what else we did we kept our eye on Mozambique. We researched it and all of Africa. We studied statistics. We read history. Mozambique was in war,and we couldn’t get into the country, but we got as close as we could. While studying in England, we flew to Tanzania for our first taste of Africa. But to us Mozambique was the ultimate goal—and the mission field of our dreams. Would we ever get there? What could we do there? Would there be enough of all that it took to be God’s hands and feet extended to that country? Was Jesus enough?

Mozambique got its independence from Portugal in 1975 after wearing down the colonialists with guerrilla warfare. A severe Marxist regime was set up, patterned after and supported by Russia and China. But a resistance movement, the Renamo, developed and for almost two decades struggled for democracy against the communist government, the Frelimo. Mozambique’s Portuguese-built infrastructure, unusually good for Africa, was nearly wiped out. Roads, bridges, villages, schools and hospitals were blown up. Savage torture and killing took place. Millions fled the country as refugees. Over a million land mines were planted, resulting in the world’s highest percentage of maimed and disabled people. In some areas half the population died from untreated infections after being blown apart by explosions.

Two-thirds of Mozambicans are illiterate. Many teenagers have never learned to do anything but shoot an AK-47. Eighty-five percent of the people live in huts, and only five percent have electricity. Less than ten percent have piped water; the rest use wells, rivers and lakes. Two-thirds of Mozambican houses do not even have pit latrines. There is only one doctor for every forty thousand people. Most do not even have access to aspirin. Half the children are dead by age five. Thousands die of malaria every year. And without the protection of immunizations taken for granted in most of the world, they are ravaged by common childhood diseases as well.

The war shredded Mozambique’s already unviable socialist economy, which after the Cold War was no longer propped up by Russian and Chinese aid. Years of drought added famine to war. In province after province across the large country, twice the size of California, children and adults wandered in blackened, burned-out villages, without clothes and food. Without international aid, half the country would have died.

By the early 1990s the people were exhausted. The warring parties were out of money. In 1992 a peace accord was signed, and in 1994 under UN supervision a new, democratic government was sworn in. One-third of the almost two million Mozambicans who fled the country because of war, banditry and drought returned.

Suddenly, in January of 1995, we had our chance. On short notice I was invited, through a mutual friend, by a South African evangelist to speak at a pastors’ conference in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Within a few days I was driving with my friends across South Africa toward the border in a red Nissan pickup truck. I had waited years for this. What would Mozambique be like?

We had to cross the border before it closed at five o’clock so we could get to our first conference meeting that night, and we were barely going to make it. As we got close our truck faltered. The gas pedal was to the floor, and our tension mounted, but the engine only missed more and more. God! we cried out. Get this thing moving! You know we have to preach tonight! Now the truck was crawling and jerking as if water was in the fuel line. We coasted into the border station, and our poor engine died altogether. We were going nowhere. But the place was electric. Guards were racing toward the gate. Everyone was shouting. A helicopter settled overhead. The car ahead of you was shot up by bandits! We’re picking up the wounded! an official yelled at us. Had our engine run, we would have been attacked just across the border, too. God protected us miraculously right from the beginning.

We pushed our truck around, and suddenly the engine ran perfectly. We had two minutes before the border closed. Should we go? No, we’ll wait and drive in convoy, we decided. Mozambique’s guerrilla fighters in the bush were desperately poor and survived by preying on lone foreign