There are many unexpected things here in Zambia. Things like the spider you almost step on in the shower, or the snake by the gate at night, or the hug you get, or the smile from someone, or the scowl from another. Things like how beautiful the sunsets are, or how hot it is at times. Things like how trees are budding green even though there has been no rain since April. The toughness of this landscape and the toughness of the people; all unexpected. I have had unexpected emotions of missing my girls at home, and my mom, and other close family members.
But God is showing me that He is a God who is also unexpected and many times works that way. He is predictable in His promises and yet excitingly unexpected in His ways. He is the same and yet we grow in knowledge of Him everyday. Seeing and experiencing Him in new ways, unexpected ways, though not to Him.
God has showed me this numerous times since we have been here but yet again, he surprises me. Noriah and I were finishing up one Bible Study with this one group of women and starting some in-between work on personality, business training, and then understanding purpose. Noriah and I prayed and were excited about having them do Purpose Driven Life as we talked about the importance of God’s plan for them. We were trying to get them to think outside of survival mode. So, we met, and met again, and then again. And each time the women had not prepared. They had not had someone read to them (which they had agreed to do), and had not done the questions. Noriah and I were frustrated as we had both been deeply impacted by this book when we had read it. So, the book sat in one of the women’s house for 2 months. It was sitting there for a purpose we did not know about.
The daughter of the one women who was keeping the book, came home on break from school. The book caught her eye one day and she started reading it. As I was getting together with her, she told me she couldn’t put it down, and it was deeply impacting her. I started to see that my frustration and seeming failure with the group, was really God saying watch me work unexpectedly over here. Monica, the daughter to the woman in our group, is so excited about the book she is taking it to school and starting a group there to go through it! Who knows what unexpected things God might do in the lives of girls at a boarding school in the middle of Sub-Saharan Africa where they can seek out not cultural, expected, assumptions of them but be challenged to see God’s purpose for their lives, which is always bigger and more exciting than what we can come up with.
Sitting back in awe again of how God is moving. We thought we knew who needed that book. Well, God had other plans. His unexpected grace is that He chose to show me this little wrinkle so I could once again smile and laugh with my God who is both the same yesterday, today, and forever and beautifully unexpected.
