We weren’t thrilled when our flight leaving Dulles was late, and we missed our flight going into Dar es salaam. We’d been warned this could happen because we didn’t have much time between those two flights. This was a result of changing our journey destination substantially, and our agent said this was the only way to change our flights without having a very long layover.

But in retrospect, we saw God’s fingerprints all over the change. We wouldn’t have met many of the people we met if we hadn’t missed our flight. But I’m getting ahead of the story!

In the Pittsburgh airport, we met a sweet young lady who said she was flying alone for the first time. (We discovered later, that she is the daughter of Tanzania’s ambassador to the United States and had been living with him at the embassy for four years.) She told us her name but it was a foreign name that I can’t remember, so I’ll called her Aadila.   

When we asked Aadila where she was going, she said, “Tanzania.” We said, “Us too! What city?” She said, “Dar es salaam.” We said, “Us too.”

With a smile, I said, “You won’t be flying alone! You’ll be with us!”

So when we missed our flight, Aadila also missed hers. We took her with us to a Lounge in the Dulles airport that someone told Donn about when he had our boarding pass changed to a flight six hours later. When she told us that her mother was very worried about her, Aadila let us talk to her mother on a What’s App video.

I told her, “Your daughter is safe! She’s with Papa Donn and Grandma Daisy!”

Later, when the Lounge closed, we went to wait at our flight gate together. My phone wasn’t working and I asked Aadila if I could use hers, but she was limited on how many funds she had available for that. A friend she had met on her previous flight had joined us and she promptly told me, “You can use my What’s App on my phone.”

So she connected me with the two numbers I needed to talk to at our hotel and our Compassion Team host. When I was in the process of using her phone, I saw that it said, “Jesus is King!” I told her how excited I was to see that and asked her how long Jesus had been her King. She said, “My parents and I have been going to church all my life.”

This surprised me but she said that the people of Tanzania are a very religious people—about half Muslim and half Christian. This was something I didn’t know and heard later it depended to whom one was talking.

Since we had a long time between flights, we had a wonderful conversation, ending up talking about God’s call to us to Japan. She was so interested and asked a lot of questions. Later, I discovered her name is Charity! Aptly named I think.

When our six hours finally passed and we got ready to board our new flight, we were shocked when the agent who had passed everyone else onto the plane told us that our tickets weren’t valid!

“Yes, they are!” I responded. I told him about missing our previous flight because our plane was late and said, “The person who gave us these new boarding passes made a mistake!”

 They made us get out of line and said they would get someone to fix the mistake. Eventually a man and woman who apparently had some authority allowed us to get on the plane. We never found out what mistake had been made, but I believe there was another important discussion on that flight that Satan didn’t want us to have. Donn had been passed to a different agent to have our new boarding passes made and no one else’s boarding passes were invalid!

At some point into the new flight, our seatmate initiated a conversation. He was a sweet young man and had good English, easy to talk to. He gave us his card. Eventually, I told him that I’d been told that the people of Tanzania were a very religious people, about half Christian and half Muslim. Then I asked if he agreed.

Mussa agreed but said that a lot of things were being mixed into Christianity that weren’t good, like witchcraft, etc. People were being told that if they had any problem, their problem would be fixed if they gave the Christians a lot of money. I was amazed at his perceptiveness that he could tell these things weren’t true Christianity.

When we were getting near the end of the flight, I asked Mussa what his religion was. He said, “I am Muslim. But lately I’ve been rethinking my religion and realizing that there is more that just Muslim beliefs.”

Our flight ended so I couldn’t ask any more questions. We went our separate ways to gather our luggage, and I turned to find that Mussa had come to say good bye! We had someone take a picture of us and he asked me to send him a copy. (I wasn’t successful while we were in Tanzania but I think it has successfully sent from home.) I hope to call him one day from the information on his card. Please pray for Mussa as he rethinks his religion.

As I thought about the events of this trip, I can see God’s fingerprints all over us missing our flight and all the people we’d have missed talking to if that flight hadn’t been missed! I look forward to sharing more of this trip in future blogs.

Father, thank you for your promise to cause all things to work together for good to those who love you and who are called according to your purpose. Help us to trust you when keeping that promise brings about plans that don’t agree with ours. Amen