I See God Now

As many of you know, and maybe as many of you have forgotten, I’m currently (unofficially) living in Walvis Bay, Namibia, Africa. What began as a three-month project to develop a worship team at a developing satellite campus has now morphed into a semi-permanent residency, due to the global spread and eventual pandemic of COVID-19, or as I prefer to call it, “Rona”. But I’m not here to discuss Rona or jobs or the dismal state of the Dow Jones Industrial. I want to talk about something completely different! (Buckle up folks. Also, wash your hands.)

A week ago Thursday, I booked flights home with Emirates Airlines for altogether too much money and trip duration, but ’tis the season after all. My flights were set to depart the next Wednesday to take me home, (via 14 days of enforced quarantine). While sad to cut my time in Namibia short, I was anxious to get home and spend time with my family, as well as save myself from getting trapped in a foreign country, eight thousand miles from home. Things were fine until Sunday morning, one week ago, when my phone chimed during our Zoom service. “One or more of your flights has been canceled!” it cheerily informed me. And it was correct! Not one, not two, but three! Every flight in my itinerary had been suspended “until further notice”. This was due mainly to the fact that Emirates suspended every flight in their service, immediately.

I was frustrated. I was stressed. I was worried, I was poor; to tap into the real me, I couldn’t even rn. As a Christian, I practically live by the phrase “God’s plan is bigger than all of us”, but at the moment I didn’t feel the usual calm that accompanied that statement. I really couldn’t figure out why this was God’s plan. Surely it was better for me to go home! Why was God seemingly blocking me at every turn? No airlines would connect out of Johannesburg. Ethiopian Airlines wanted an exorbitant amount just to fly me to Addis Ababa. As much as I wanted to visit a city that sounded like a rejected title for Disney’s 1992 “Aladdin”, try as I might I couldn’t get anything to work. I was well and truly stuck.

Then came this past Wednesday. Without warning, the flu swooped in and knocked me flat on my back. I couldn’t move, couldn’t eat, could barely think; all I could do was lay there questioning: “Rona is that you??”. For almost four days straight it was all I could do to just hold on and not die. Gradually, as I grappled the fever and came out on top, I started to think about my predicament. If I had taken that flight, I would have been dying in the Johannesburg airport. Or Dubai. Or Boston. Or on one of the flights. The symptoms started in earnest mere hours before I was originally scheduled to take off from Hosea Kutako in Windhoek, But instead, through the mysterious grace and timing of God, I was grounded and was able to rest and recover at home in Walvis Bay.

A lot of times I try and understand the mind of God. I try and read into what I think His will is, and I try and discover what His plan is for my life. And time and time again, I’m always wowed at how He works and intercedes for me. Literally every time. The stubborn, difficult human in me is so sure that I know better than God. If He’d just listen to me things would work out. And I ignore the millions and millions of times that He proved that He was right all along, and I just couldn’t see things in hindsight at that moment. A fellow missionary I know once told me that life is a lot like walking backward. You only see God’s work after it’s happened; you only see the effects of God’s protection, and not His active and continued efforts to intercede for you.

For me, that’s strangely comforting. Because while I may not be able to understand or reason why something may be happening during the situation or crisis, I can be confident that, further down the road, I can look back and say “oh yeah, I see God now.”