This month in Ethiopia, my team and I are doing what’s called “Ask the Lord” or ATL for short. That means we don’t have a host and we don’t have a ministry to do. We didn’t even know which city we were supposed to go to, but only knew that our job was to reach out to the Afar people group, which is in the northern part of Ethiopia. Fun fact: this place is supposedly the hottest place on earth.

After a few days of praying and planning in Addis Ababa, the capital (and for me a couple days of sickness- the sickest I’ve been so far on the race), we set out for the town of Awash.

Thankfully, we got connected with a very nice man from a local church in the capital, and he volunteered to help get us safely to our destination. There is no way we would have made it to our town without him- we don’t speak the local language, and there were some difficulties. There are no buses to this town from the capital, so he was able to find us a taxi to a city partway to Awash, then negotiated a price with another van to get us the rest of the way there. He traveled with us through the heat in a cramped van with no A/C out of the goodness of his heart.

Upon our arrival to the hotel we had booked online, he set out to find us a local church to connect with. Not only was he able to find one, but he found the local man that works with all five of the local churches here to organize events and things. We didn’t have to do anything but ask the Lord for a place to go, and He provided a place for us. We asked for help booking transportation, and we received an escort. We didn’t even ask how to find local connections- they were given to us by a man that loves the Lord. 

The things that we didn’t even know we needed were provided for us because God knew in advance that we would need them. As it turns out, it isn’t really smart for a group of English-speaking American women to wander around here- we attract a lot of attention just by walking down the street, and not necessarily good attention. The connection with the church was a huge, huge blessing because not only does it give us ministry to do, but the people there also helped us figure out where and how to buy food, and found us a better place to stay that’s in our budget as well as teaching us some local cultural norms.

The Lord is good, y’all. He not only answered our prayers for direction and provision, but He also provided things that we didn’t even know we needed. When you trust Him and ask Him, He will answer because He is our good Father.