God is Never Random

 

 

      Do you ever feel like God is listening to your thoughts. Like those days when I’m feeling so lonely, and I start to have a bit of a pity party and just as I think, “No one cares…” one of my most favorite persons calls my phone just to say hello. I hang up the phone “Yes Lord, I get it, I’m loved.”  Or the other day when the Guinea heat was getting to me and I was thinking I’d much rather take a car then walk, and then I turned down a street and both the people walking in front of me were lame, they don’t have the car option either. “Okay God I got it, I am blessed.”

 

     There are moments like these that I could take as coincidence or providence. But then there are some moments, like in our travels across Cape Verde that I can really only attribute to providence. Like jumping into the back of a Yassi and just happening to meet a girl, who speaks English, who goes to the church we are about to look for and has time to take us there.

 

     Or the time Rita and I are walking out to a street about to catch a Taxi to go wander around an area in town to locate a denominational office. As we approach the road, I start getting creeped out by this man watching us, there are other people around but he has zoned in on us. He walks forward and back and then asks where we are going. We name the area and he says. “Oh I am going there too. Would you like to share a taxi?” He goes through a big explanation telling us it’s cheaper and faster to share a taxi then to take the bus. “Um okay, we can share a taxi.” In the Taxi we find out he is pastor of an Evangelical church and knows the office we are looking for. When we get out of the taxi he insist on paying the cab driver and then takes us the office we are looking for and introduces us to the man with whom we need to speak. The man gives us the name of another pastor who is Guinea-Bissauan and tells us he is a good contact for finding out about ministry among West Africans in Cape Verde.

 

     The coincidences continue as we leave with a church and a neighborhood name on a piece of paper. Walking down the street we are not sure which way to go, we ask a few people and are being directed towards the ocean. “Can we walk there?” “Oh, yes, it’s not far!” So we keep going we pass a bus stop, just as an overcrowded bus pulls up. Rita wants to get on; I don’t feel like being sweated on. The bus leaves and we start to walk again but suddenly Rita stops. “I want to ask that man!” She exclaims and then walks up to a random guy standing with others at a bus stop, except the word random never really applies with God. This fellow not only knows the neighborhood, he is a Maninka speaker from Guinea, the northern district close to the Mali border. Rita lived in Mali for 9 years and is fluent in Bambara. His Maninka is so close to Bamabara that Rita and our new friend have no trouble understanding one another. This man apparently has plenty of time to take us to the neighborhood. He hails us a taxi and we all set off together. He is obviously enjoying speaking is heart language with Rita but despite his Muslim background, he also seems just as interested as we are in finding this church. When we arrive in the neighborhood he pays for the taxi himself and escorts us to the building, he stays with us through the interview and ask the pastor a few questions of his own. After the interview he suggest a few more evangelical churches we should visit, hails another taxi and takes us into some West African communities. We end the day at his place drinking a cold Fanta and making arrangement to meet again when Rita can Bluetooth some Bambara stories into his phone. At our next meeting, he invites two other West Africans over who speak English (so I won’t be left out), one is from lower Guinea his heart language is Koinyanka, I have a friend working on translation for Koinyanka. I call her up and she sends greetings to him in his native language, huge smile on his face. The other is a Mandingo from Liberia which happens to be the least reached people group in Liberia. He gives me contact so that when I move to Liberia in January I can look up his sister.

 

     This Maninka man and the coincidence of running into such an open person, is what I have heard termed as a “person of peace.” You can read about them in Luke 10:5-6. God not only can and does interact with us even through simple things like a timely call, but he has been at work all over the world long before we gain the initiative to walk into an unreached neighborhood. Many people are afraid to take the step of following God’s lead into overseas missions because they believe they will be beginning with hard soil. But God says, “The harvest is plentiful.” God may not be asking you to lead an entire African village to the Lord, he may just be asking you to go find the person of peace that he has already prepared and invest your time and wisdom with him.  

 

     In closing, God is never random. If you think, “Wow that was a pretty big coincidence,” it probably was not. God has big plans and he reveals them to people who are paying attention. And sometimes even to people who blunder through life like me; who don’t want to inconvenience the girl on the back of the Yassi, who get creeped out by the guy staring across the street, who would have rather passed the man at the bus stop. Stop and pay attention; He is doing stuff.