Have you ever started out knowing that you know where you are going and what will happen that day? We meticulously plan our day and have everything planned just right. Then everything starts to fall apart because some part of the plan did not go right.
Whether in the cities or near the villages, Bangladesh is a maze of roads filled with people traveling by foot and in all sorts of vehicles.Well, this is the way things go in our lives almost daily here.
We had two volunteer teams experience this with us one day. The plan was to go to our house helper’s house and to meet his family and share with them. We loaded up the vans and started the journey in that direction.
Mickey* continued to say, “I know which road it is.”
We turned down the road where Mickey was confident we had gone before when we visited Sanad’s* family. We parked the vans and started to walk down the path toward what Mickey still thought was Sanad’s village.
He stopped a number of times and asked anyone if they knew Sanad and each time received a blank stare or “No, we do not know him.” We continued deeper into the village until it was evident we were not where we wanted to be.
As we turned to leave and go back to the vans – embarrassed, hot and sweating – we had developed a following of people who we are sure were quite amused at us. Well, this was not who we were looking for, but this is who God had put in our path.
One of the team members started to share and used a Muslim term, and Mickey said, “These are Hindus.” They quickly corrected him when they said, “We are Muslims.” So the story continued, and the people listened attentively.
A young man asked some questions, not really about the story but to practice his English. Still, we started handing out tracts, which were in the Muslim language, and gave out more than 100 to this group. As we left the area, we stopped, got out of the vans, and handed out another 50 tracts.
We came back that day knowing we had not gone where we had planned, but we had gone where God wanted us to be.
Bangladeshi girls skip past a lumberyard during rainy season in the country’s capital of Dhaka.Much of the time when the teams from Oklahoma and South Carolina were here was like this. We had a plan, but God had a better one, as is always the case.
The teams handed out more than 3,000 tracts, and hundreds of people heard the gospel spoken to them. We have received almost 300 calls from these efforts. A national is very busy now getting information from these people, and he and Mickey will return to many of these areas and share more about who God is.
Ironically, one of the tracts we hand out is called, “Which Path?” Isn’t it a comfort to know that when we are lost, God is there to find us?
Actually, when we are one of his children, we are never lost, just heading down the wrong path. With his loving hand, he directs us back to where he wants us to be. We praise him for his continual leadership, direction and guidance.
Please pray for:
– Follow-up with those with whom we have shared evangelism materials, Bible stories and testimonies.
– God to bring together the perfect number of teams and partners from the United States to serve alongside us in 2009 and for it to be all about his plans and not our own.
– Protection and boldness of national believers experiencing persecution.
*Names changed for security reasons. Mickey and Geri Hennerman* serve as strategy coordinators for a Muslim people group in Bangladesh. In 2008, they spent three months visiting prayer partners and churches in South Carolina.
South Carolina volunteers meet these Muslim men during an unscheduled stop along a countryside roadway.