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Mali Trip: God Can Even Provide A Wife

Listening to Mamado and Douda’s testimony was moving. Mamado was the first Christian in his dialect and came to Christ through a Christian radio station. He didn’t have the Bible, so he prayed for a solid year that God would send someone to teach him about Christ. At the end of the year, God sent Tom and Laura Requadt to serve with Mamado when rebels moved into their house in Cote d’Iviore, forcing them to Mali and Mamado’s village. Now Mamado is the pastor of the growing church in his language and the translator helper with Tom. Douda is fruit of Mamado’s gift for evangelism. To hear how God is working around the world is exhilarating at the very least! To see the wondrous change in people and to hear how Douda was a slave to fetishes and renounced them to follow Jesus, because Jesus is the only one with true power, was encouraging. It was neat to see something as basic as a wife, being a huge provision. When Douda came to Christ, there were no Christian women to marry, so God had to provide one from somewhere else. The States certainly view marriage differently. We almost expect to be married and decide, in love, who to marry and almost see it as our right to be married. But for Douda, it was a huge concern to go to Christianity because if he abandons the fetishes he doesn’t get a fetish wife. That point seems trivial and almost encouraging, but when there are NO Christian women in the region and he has to work the fields everyday to survive, how will he get a wife unless God supernaturally provides one? And that is exactly what God did! And because God provided a wife who was not from this area, the church here was able to witness the very first Christian wedding in this region! How great is our God?!

Thinking about this I looked at Nohoua and emphatically stated, “One day God will provide us a wife! One day!” Which Nohoua laughed in agreement as if he was thinking the same thing.