He Knows What We Need Before We Ask

This is Jodi updating her own blog for once! I want to say hi to everybody and thank you for all your nice emails. I haven't been able to reply to most of them yet, but I have big plans to do that, so just hang tight!

I would like to share some experiences I have had with my friend Bornface this past month. Bornface is probably in his forties, and he is blind. Everyday at lunchtime I ride my bike out to his village to visit him. We usually study the Sabbath School lesson during our visits, and I have been getting to know him.

Bornface has been going blind for about 19 years. Back in '88 (I think) my Aunt Louanne visited Africa and paid for Bornface to have surgery on his eyes. The surgery gave him about 10 years of sight, but about 8 years ago, his eyesight began to leave him again, and now he is completely blind. I have made it a habit every time I visit Bornface to ask him what he wants me to pray for. One day he told me the story about what happened with his wife. Bornface has five sons and three daughters. His wife started running around with other men and had the three girls with other men. But Bornface raised those girls as if they were his own. His wife would repeatedly leave him and then come back, begging Bornface for mercy. Each time he took her back and loved her as if nothing had ever happened. Finally though, about three years ago she left him for good, and he hasn't really talked to her since. After telling me that story, he asked me to pray for her. He wants her to take Jesus back into her heart. He told me that even now, after all that has happened, he would still take her back if she wanted to come back as his wife. He said that God has been so merciful to him, that he can't turn around and be anything but merciful to her. I couldnt believe it, but I added his wife to our prayer list.

Another time when I asked Bornface if he had anything new to add to the prayer list, he told me about the co-operative they have in his village. If you buy into it, you can get your fertilizer and seed for planting for a much cheaper price than if you were to go buy it in town. The problem, he told me, was that this year he hasn't been able to get enough money, and that now he didn't know how he was going to be able to plant this year. So we started praying about it. I knew that God answers prayers, but I also knew that God often uses people to help him answer those prayers. It was obvious to me that God was going to use me to answer Bornface's prayer, so I decided that I was going to write home and see if I could raise some money because my parents had told me that there were some people at home interested in sending money for projects here. Three weeks passed and I still hadn't written home. We went on a trip to Lake Malawi, and I was so busy that I always had some excuse to give myself for why I still hadn't written home about Bornface.

Meanwhile, I was still visitng Bornface every day, and one day, he told me about his friend, Graham who is was very sick with TB. He had gone to visit him the previous Sabbath and he had found Graham doing much worse. I asked if we could go visit him that Sabbath, and Bornface thought that would be a good idea. So last Sabbath I walked to Bornface's house and together we went over to see Graham. Inside a surprisingly nice hut, (I say it was nice because it had a cement floor and a wooden door- where most huts have dirt floors and sometimes there is no door) I met Graham, sitting on a bed on the floor. He was breathing as if he had just finished running a marathon, and from the way he was swaying back and forth, I thought he might blow over if I so much as breathed on him. He did not strike me as the picture of health, to say the least. Graham didn't say much because every word took a huge effort. Just to breathe was enough of a chore. Bornface and I did most of the talking, and then I went over the Sabbath School lesson for that day with him. I couldn't help but smile as I read the Bible verses for that day's lesson, because they all seemed to fit the situation perfectly. ( the verses were Isaiah 40:27-31, John 14:1-14, Romans 8:28-39, and Ephesians1:18-23, in case anybody wanted to know what they were.) After we finished, Graham had to go take a bath, so we said we would wait until he came back so we could read to him some more. A relative came in and helped Graham stand, and together they walked out of the hut, painfully slow. I could
hardly believe that somebody so thin could have any life in him. We had to leave before he came back because it started to rain.

This past Monday, Bornface and I studied ahead in the qarterly because I was leaving for a two day bush clinic the next day and then Thursday was Thanksgiving, and I was going to be gone that day too, so we wouldn't be able to meet for three whole days. We finished the lesson for Wednesday, November 21, entitled "To carry all our Worry", with plans to do Thursday's and Friday's lessons on Friday when I got back. Wednesday's lesson was all about giving our worries to God and we read Matthew 6:25-33 where it talks about not worrying because our Heavenly Father knows what we need before we even ask for it, and how if He takes care of the birds and makes the lillies beautiful, how much more will He take care of us? At the end of the lesson, it asks, " What are things that cause you to worry now? However legitimate they are, however troublesome they are, is there anything too hard for the Lord? Maybe our biggest problem is that even though we believe that God knows about it and can fix it, we dont believe that He will resolve it the way we would like it to be resolved". I asked Bornface if there was anything he finds himself worrying about. I knew he was going to say the maize. And he did! He said, "Ah , Jodi! It is so hard to stop worrying! Sometimes I lie awake all night just thinking through my mind, how am I going to do this? I think I just need to remember how much God has taken care of me before, and then I can start to trust God." So then Bornface and I prayed that God would help us to trust Him with everything and to stop worrying. We thanked Him that He knows what we need even before we ask for it. We told God that we were going to trust Him with the maize because we knew He could take care of us. We prayed that God would be with Graham, and that somehow he would send Graham a moment of peace. Just a moment where the pain would be taken away and he could just relax for a second. Then I left.

On Tuesday we were supposed to leave for our overnight bush clinic. Ellen, a lady who does laundry for us SM's still hadn't arrived yet, and I was wondering where she was, because she usually is punctual. I asked my Aunt Pauline where she thought Ellen could be, and she said, "Oh, I betI know where she is, there's a funeral out in Shingoma today. She probably went to that." I gasped when I realized what had happened. Graham had died. I asked my Aunt and she confirmed my thoughts. Graham had died the afternoon of the day before. I could hardly believe it, but thenI remembered what Bornface and I had prayed just the day before, asking God to give Graham a moment of peace. God answers prayers in a big way around here. Graham is more peaceful right now than he has ever been before, and the next face he will see is the face of Jesus. How much more relaxing can you get? I wanted to go to the funeral, but we had a bush clinic to do, so off we went.

On the way, we stopped at the post office to pick up the mail. I was surprised to get a letter from my friend Tony Bentley, who is currently a Student Missionary over in Palau. I opened the letter and was surprised to see money folded inside the letter. I haven't seen American money in so long that I almost didn't recognize it! I didn't think much of the money, I was just so happy to read the letter, but then I got to the part that explained the money and I could not believe what was happening. Tony wrote me a nice letter about how he had read one of my emails telling about the way people live out here, and he decided he wanted to help. He said he has decided to send me his paychecks for the month. The paychecks he gets out in Palau are to pay for groceries and other essentials. He said he didn't know how things were going to work out for him, but that he was going to trust God to take care of him. The amount enclosed in the letter was $115, $15 more than the amount Bornface needed to buy fertilizer and Maize seeds. I was in awe. I was speechless. I was humbled, and my faith soared. Who am I to think that I was going to be God's answer to Bornface's prayer? Was my faith so small that I didn't think God had a plan already? I looked at the stamp on the envelope, it was from October 31. I didn't even know that Bornface needed money yet on October 31! And that is the amazing part to me. I didnt know, but GOD knew. Isn't that exactly what we had been studying just the day before? That God knows what we need even before we ask for it? I just couldnt believe what had happened. Still can't.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I was able to give Bornface the money. He was so thankful. He knows that God is taking care of him. He has in the past, He is today, and He will continue to do so in the future.

How about the rest of us, where is our faith? I was pretty sure I had faith before any of this happened, butI am beginning to realize how small that faith really was. In fact, I am learning that a lot of things I thought I had before coming to Zambia are things that I really don't have at all. I'm just praying that God will continue to work on me!