As detailed in Sunday's blog, Karen and I just returned from Swaziland.

Here was one of the more heart-rending visits we made:

Pastor Gift ushered us into one typical homestead. The only light came from the sun leaking through chinks in the walls and the low doorway.

Lying on a pallet on the packed earth floor was the shriveled form of a skeletal woman underneath a pile of blankets. The skin on her face was stretched taut over fragile bones. She was dying of AIDS, (though it is starvation that will finish her off as she is now too weak to manage food). Unable to sit up, she welcomed us with her voice and her eyes.

"I'm ready to die," she told us. "I know Jesus and know that he will greet me. But here I am alone. Few people come to visit me." We asked her to be ready to welcome us with a hug when we get there, as she will likely be there first.

And now we were not white foreigners visiting an African woman, but we were brothers and sisters in the same family, happy to share moments together and touched by the real hope of being reunited on the other side.

One of our team members, Debi Ferrarello, describes how we ended our time there: "Deeply moved, I touched my sister's face, shoulder, hands, and prayed a blessing upon her. Paraphrasing a recurring line from William Young's The Shack, I looked deeply into her eyes and told her, "Jesus is especially fond of you." As a group, we sang a serenade of love for her and for our Father, of worship and of praise. God's love transcended culture and language.

In the humble chapel of a mud hut in the African bush, a dear sister soon to be with Jesus and an unlikely band of Americans led by a Swazi pastor and his wife, God's glory shined."