Dreams And Visions

One of the families we interviewed with the help of our
translator (on my left)

This past week we had the chance to visit some pastors who’ve been sent out to villages where there is no church established yet. It was a great experience to see what things are like for these pastors and learn what kind of help they need most to assist them in sharing the love of Christ with these communities. We talked a lot about the big needs water, health care, schools, and literacy, basically whatever the church can offer to be a tangible billboard for the gospel message.

One part of the visits that really fascinated me was hearing the stories of people who came to believe through dreams and visions- not such a common experience for us. In one village there was a youth who started asking the pastor a lot of questions from what he had learned in Koranic school and what it says about Jesus in the Koran. As he found answers his teacher couldn’t discredit, he started to believe in Jesus. Then where ever he went, he would have a vision of a hyena following him, staring him down, and telling him he would kill him if he didn’t renounce his faith. Whenever the youth would come to the pastor’s house, the hyena would leave. After one night when he came to the pastor’s house so terrified he couldn’t talk, they did a lot of focused prayer and fasting and the youth hasn’t had the vision since. They found out later that the youth’s teacher had gone around to other leaders in the village asking them to pray against the youth’s new activities. That opposition was tame compared to some of the other things we heard people face from their families!