A New Thing Springs Up in South Africa

On April 27, 1994, seventy-five-year-old Nelson Mandela stood in a queue of ordinary citizens outside Ohlange High School in Inanda, KwaZulu-Natal, waiting to cast a ballot for the first time in his life. Across South Africa that morning, lines snaked for miles — millions of Black South Africans who had never been permitted to vote stood patiently for hours under the autumn sun, some having walked since before dawn. In a nation scarred by decades of apartheid's brutal segregation, something unimaginable was happening. Former prisoners voted alongside former wardens. Township residents stood in the same lines as those who had once enforced their oppression.

When Mandela marked his ballot, he later said he felt as though he were "voting with all the people who could not be there." Within days, the results were clear. Mandela would become South Africa's first Black president, inaugurated on May 10 at the Union Buildings in Pretoria — the very seat of the government that had imprisoned him for twenty-seven years.

Isaiah 43:19 declares, "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland." God specializes in doing what no human calculation would predict. The wilderness of hatred gave way to a road no one thought possible. Whatever barren ground you are staring at today, the God who made streams flow through South Africa's wasteland is not finished yet.