Inside Story – Tanzania
Timely Lesson
By Godwin K. Lekundayo
God taught me about heaven’s understanding of time when, as a district pastor, I led a three-week evangelistic series in my homeland, Tanzania.
Image © Pacific Press
Local organizers chose the dry season for the meetings in Moshi, a city at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. But heavy rains started to fall after the first week. Worried that the rain would keep people at home, I suggested that we reschedule the meetings for later.
To my surprise, the chairman of the local evangelistic committee, a lay person, refused.
“No, pastor, we are not going to postpone,” he said. “We have been praying about these meetings, and our Lord heard our prayers and knew the rain would fall.”
“So, what shall we do?” I said. “You can see that it is raining heavily.”
“We have to have a little faith to believe that our God can be sensitive about the time of the meetings,” he said. “Let us pray this way, ‘Our good Lord, You can allow the rains to fall as much as You wish, but let there be no rain from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.’” This way people would have 30 minutes to travel to the 4 p.m. meetings and 30 minutes to return home after the meetings ended at 6 p.m.
I wasn’t sure about such a request, but I joined in the prayer.
The next morning, the rain fell in torrents. The downpour continued into the afternoon. But exactly at 3:30 p.m., it stopped. Our meeting started at 4 p.m., and I preached until 6 p.m. The rain started again at 6:30 p.m.
The weather followed this schedule for two weeks. Rain poured down until 3:30 p.m., stopped, and then started again at 6:30 p.m.
One day, a visitor arrived at the meeting site at 3 p.m. to get a good seat. He waited for some time and, seeing the heavy downpour, decided that the meeting would be canceled and left. The next day he asked whether we had met.
“Of course,” I replied. “We didn’t ask God to stop the rain at 3 p.m. We asked for 3:30 p.m., so you should have been sensitive about that.”
“I’ll never make that mistake again,” the man said.
On the last Sabbath, I baptized twelve people in a river. As I brought the last person out of the water, the rain started to fall.
The experience taught me that God is sensitive to time. While God may not face time constraints as we do, He does expect us to be sensitive to time, too, and to be good stewards of time. Paul tells us in Ephesians 5:15-16, “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time” (NKJV).
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God answers prayer. He allows test of our faith.
I truly believed in the Lord of time. A few years ago I found myself waking us late for devotion and then had to hurry to get to work. I prayed about it and then I heard a voice saying to get in the shower at 6. Any time I do such I can leave on time to get to work. Jesus is so much concerned about the minor things in our lives, he majors in then for our good.
This story reminds me of the following anecdote that took place several decades ago:
We were visiting my parents who lived in the city of Riverside, California, at that time. It was a terribly hot day, and it had not rained in a very long time. My parents did not have air conditioning in their home, and we were perspiring heavily due to the unusual hot season.
My mother, who has always been a person of a strong spiritual faith, suddenly said: It is really hot, and we need some rain. Let us sing “There shall be showers of blessings.” We did, and we sang it in Spanish, since that had become my parent’s adopted language when they emigrated to South America after leaving Ukraine back in 1937.
I did not pay too much attention to the incident, and we returned to our home in Loma Linda in the evening. Of course, we did have air conditioning in our home, for which reason we were greatly relieved upon arriving back to our place.
That night it rained, and the rain was so heavy that I told my wife: We need to call my mother and ask her to please ask the Lord to stop this rain, because I think that it will flood our backyard. Of course, it didn’t, but it came pretty close.
This and Nic’s story reminds of James 5:16-18.
The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit.