LBC Prayer Week: Devotion 1

For this Week of Prayer in LBC I want to share with you some true stories that have really encouraged me.

In his autobiography ‘Out of the Black Shadows’, the Zimbabwean Bible teacher, Stephen Lungu, recounts the story of how he came from being a gang member to being a Christian.  He also tells the amazing account of how he met his wife.

One day when Stephen was praying he had what he describes as a sort of waking vision.  In this vision he saw a young woman seated before him, dressed in a loose blue outfit and holding a Bible.  The Bible happened to be upside down yet in the vision he could see what page it was opened at—Acts 26.  This was hugely significant for Stephen as the Lord had used Acts 26 previously in his life.  This vision came to him two more times over the following two years and he occasionally thought about it and wondered what it meant.        

When he was visiting another part of the country, a friend mischievously suggested that he must meet a girl called Rachel. 

A few days later he was speaking at a youth meeting.  After he had preached he was talking to a man who was asking him questions about faith.  Stephen’s eye was caught by the person seated just behind the man—a girl in a loose blue outfit, holding a Bible, which happened to be upside-down and open at Acts 26.   The next day he decided to visit the man he had been talking with.  When he arrived the houseboy told him that he was out.  Seeing Stephen’s disappointment the houseboy invited him in and told him to wait a moment.  Then a young woman appeared.  Stephen could not believe his eyes.  It was the young woman from the vision again, the man’s sister, who happened to be the girl, Rachel, his friend had said he should meet.

Do you think that Stephen Lungu thinks those events were simply a strange set of coincidences?  That Rachel ‘just happened’ to be in that dress, that she ‘just happened’ to holding the Bible upside down at Acts 26, and that she ‘just happened’ to be the woman his friend suggested he meet and the sister of the man he was visiting?  God may be invisible but things don’t ‘just happen.’

What ever you are facing today, remember that the God who stands behind all things cares for you.