Over the weekend, someone asked me whether we thought we still needed to process more or whether we’d decided (God-willing!) to go to Tanzania. I said definitely the latter – we’ve been excited by how right it’s felt. Here’s how:

• I felt like on our first night in Dodoma, I saw Arthur come alive. He was buzzing from our cross cultural experiences on the bus in a way that I’d never seen before. I had this moment of “Oh, this is totally what God made Arthur for!”

• God organised a whole stack of stuff for us. We met with the TAFES (IFES) National Director on a public holiday, for example, and he wasn’t even meant to be in the country except that his conference in Uganda had been postponed!

• God knew better than us how to make things happen. We didn’t get to meet with the bishop at St John’s while we were there – the one, most strategic meeting we needed to have! But that was because he was off in another part of TZ with an Australian bishop who was chatting to him about student ministry. The St John’s bishop came back far more fired up about student ministry than he would have been if we’d chatted to him and the door is now open.

We went to Tanzania with two questions in mind:

• Can we live / work here? and
• Do these people want us to live / work here?

The reason we were asking those questions was because we wanted to discern whether Tanzania was part of God’s future for us. And we answered both those questions, both with a ‘yes’.

But what I didn’t expect was the supernatural ‘rightness’ of that. There’s something more to it than a pragmatic decision. We went to work out if we could go but now I discover that there’s something much bigger going on, that someone else has been orchestrating this. We thought we were planning; now we see that this is actually God’s plan that he’s slipped us into.

Categories: Tanzania Written by Tamie

Tagged as: decision making guidance planning sovereignty Tanzania

Tamie Davis

Tamie Davis is an Aussie living in Tanzania, writing at meetjesusatuni.com.