Let Your Light So Shine Before Man…

After two years in varsity, it was time for a year of work-related learning (popularly referred to as ‘attachment’ in Zimbabwe). This would, in turn, count as my third year of varsity. But let me tell you, getting a placement for that attachment was not an easy feat for me at all. At the beginning of that quest, I barely knew the city I lived in (as in the cbd of the city). I only knew where public transport would drop me off from home and how to cautiously calculate all my moves to be close to that place so that I would not get lost and forget my way back to where I could get public transport.

However, after what must have been three months of walking all over the city from office to office dropping off my CV, I knew every street and avenue in that town. I applied everywhere that I thought they would take me, but, unfortunately, they didn’t. There is this one particular CEO that I remember vividly. This woman gave me false hope from the day I dropped my CV at her company. She personally assured me she would hire me and had me coming to her office weekly to check on the progress of my application only for her to say come back next week Tuesday which would turn to next week Thursday to next week Wednesday, to next week Mon…I mean.

To add salt to the wound, her office was at the very edge of the city and required A LOT of walking to get to (on my part) but she seemingly couldn’t resist these unnecessary postponements. Her reasons for postponing varied from “I haven’t gotten the time to go through your CV” to “I finally managed to go through your CV and I LOVE IT but I haven’t gotten the time to really decide on the specifics of the role I intend to give you.”

Looking back now, I realize that this was actually quite spiritual. There is just no other explanation as to why this woman would visibly like me but for 2 months (and counting) wouldn’t seem to come to the conclusion of actually hiring me. Whenever I walked out of her office, I had such fresh hope that she was very close to hiring me: closer than the previous time we met. She, however, somehow, just never came to the point of actually hiring me. Her preference of me and warm-heartedness towards me gave me such renewed strength that I am not even sure I fervently prayed about her hiring me because I just thought she definitely would.

Let me just say this, whenever you choose to take life at face value where you think what you see in the natural is all there is to your story, you are in big trouble. Life, in all it’s facets, is spiritual. It takes spiritual victory to be victorious in the natural and spiritual failure too to fail in the natural. Because I did not take authority over this situation, it sure did take authority over me. The truth is, it didn’t matter how much this CEO liked me, she still never hired me because I just never took this frustrating situation seriously in prayer.

Ephesians 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

As the days turned to weeks which turned to months, I was beginning to despair as I had to have at least done 8 months of work-related learning for it to be considered by my university and time was flying by fast! It is just at this time that God sent me a destiny helper. This was my paternal grandmother’s brother’s son (uncle Cephas to me) who also happened to be in the same city with me.

Due to God’s orchestration, he unexpectedly reached out to my aunt asking if I could come spend a few days with his family. To the best of my memory, I had never met him before this point but he had known my dad before he passed away and had been quite fond of him, it seemed. Well, of course, I agreed to go spend a few days with his family, after all, not much was keeping me busy then, if we don’t count dropping off CVs over and over and over to no avail.

Those few days with my uncle’s family were some of the most impactful days of my life to date. I even still remember them from time to time and just get inspired all over again. When I met him I was just welcomed with this atmosphere of peace that seemed to accompany him. He was kind, gentle and peaceful and treated me like he had known me all his life.

He drove us to his home which was in one of the really great low density neighborhoods I had ever been to at that time. I had never even seen a remote-controlled electric gate yet at that time so when he opened his gate using a remote control, I was absolutely wowed! His house was big and beautiful and when we walked in, I got to meet his wife, daughter and younger sister who was my age. At the risk of exaggeration, let me say everything about my uncle’s life seemed to exude peace to me. His wife was sweet and kind and the daughter took an instant liking to me. His sister also seemed bubbly and welcoming and keen to get to know me. I looked around me and everything seemed so peaceful, so so peaceful, my goodness!

During our drive to his home, he had asked me about my life and I had told him about my saga of desperately needing an attachment placement to which he offered to help me come up with a new CV as he felt it would increase my chances of getting a placement. The next day he took me to his office where he was going to type out my CV and print it for me. Again, his workplace was situated in such a posh neighborhood where everything seemed safe and pristine. Also, to be fair, I had barely had exposure to much as someone who had grown up in the village, so when things seemed wow to me, they really seemed wow. 🙂

During that hour or two I was with him at his workplace, I remember him casually saying he missed his wife and proceeding to call her just to ask her how her day was going and tell her that he loved her and missed her and couldn’t wait to see her again. I wasn’t even at his office that long either, just for context, but I could see him texting his wife smiling and happily calling her.

One thing about me, I am very observant and whenever I get to be with a person, I am always wondering why God had us meet and try to pay attention to whatever I can learn from them as much as possible, because what if that is why God brought me in their proximity, right? In this instance, it was very refreshing to see my married uncle genuinely seem to be so in love with his wife so again, I was very wowed.

I had just assumed all married men were so distant and emotionless head-of-homes with must-be-revered boss vibes who were nothing as affectionate as my uncle seemed to be. Even later on, when we went together on an errand, my uncle and his wife held hands happily in public. It really was like a script from a chick-flick spending time with my uncle and his family. Even in the evening back at home, they had a no-phone policy after dinner time so as to really just spend time together as a family which I found very cute.

My uncle and his wife were Holy Spirit-filled, and it vividly reflected in their conduct. The caring advice I got from them, especially from his wife, was to pursue an authentic relationship with God and, when the time comes, make the noble choice of getting married to a God-fearing man. It was emphasized to me that I could not afford to not have a relationship with God or to get married to a godless man. They both reiterated that they were so thankful that they both married a God-fearing spouse as it had significantly improved the quality of their lives.

On one of the nights I stayed with them, we went to help their couple friends who were moving abroad to pack up some of their stuff. They too were a God-fearing couple and as we were helping them pack, I saw many Christian books and I was particularly drawn to two Joyce Meyer books and I couldn’t help but ask for those two books and they gave them to me. (The significance of these two particular books and the choice of author is something so significant but we will get to talk about that in a separate blog post altogether.)

There were also other people who had come to help this couple pack and also to say their goodbyes so it was possibly three couples present and other family members, so we had dinner after packing. At the end of dinner, my uncle led us in a time of prayer, of affirming the departing couple and sharing of holy communion. Up to this point, I had only seen holy communion shared in special Sunday services so it was quite a new thing for me. There was such a manifest presence of God in that place, such unity and such Christlike love among the people present that made me really wish to one day get married to a God-fearing man and be a part of such a knit community.

Christ can be so tangible in a believer’s life and so can the Holy Spirit. At least to me, He was very tangible in my uncle’s family’s life. Their words of advice on pursuing Christ matched their conduct, it was very believable. The picture I got from their union was that the way you live your life as a child of God really is an epistle that can be read by man and glorify God.

Thank God my uncle invited me to his home and gave me a glimpse of his life for those few days. I don’t even think he has any idea how observing him love his wife, love his daughter, love his sister, love his friends ministered deeply to me. (Perhaps, I should tell him :)).

By the time I went back home, I had new goals for my life. New goals on the nature of a husband I aspired to have, the type of wife I would be, the type of neighborhood I wanted to live in, the type of place I wanted to work in, the type of community of friends I wanted around me. Just for humor’s sake, I did not even know that the ‘go to your room’ type of discipline worked, especially on toddlers, but it actually did and I saw it work so I learnt that from him too. I saw that a marriage can be honorable and admirable in Christ…in short, I learnt a lot okay!

Matthew 5:16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

I know that it is possible that my uncle’s life that I experienced in a few days was possibly not always like that. I am sure he also had bad days and other normal stuff that humans are prone to but my goodness did those few days really shift my perspective on life.

After I went back home, I started applying for placement with my new CV and the first response I got was within a week from a government ministry. Even fascinating is how they told me that somehow I had left out my phone number from the CV but because it was very good, they had gone to great lengths to look for me, even calling my lecturers back in varsity to ask about my phone number. The day I got there everyone knew about ‘the girl with a CV without a phone number‘ and they just instantly liked me and gave me the placement so I started going to work. Unfortunately, there was no work to do there so I spent most of my days watching series and scrolling on social media until it was quite worrying as I needed to write weekly reports on what I had learnt for evaluation at school but there was nothing to write in these reports.

I didn’t understand why they had frantically searched for me when they clearly didn’t need me so the one time I received a last minute call to come to an interview at a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) where, unlike my current workplace, there was promise of a stipend, I was very excited. The only problem was that I only received this call two hours before the interview while I was already at work. I had to come up with a story to be excused for a few hours and I ran like a headless chicken to the other end of the city to be in this interview.

My attire was not that appropriate for an interview as I was trying my best to bring the word ‘formal’ to my student closet. I hadn’t even gotten the chance to prepare for this interview and when I arrived there, the other interviewees I saw coming out of the interview were dressed better than me and seemed more prepared than I was in heels and everything. In that interview, in all honesty, I did not do well. I even failed to give the difference between equality and equity which was one of the first questions in the interview and that threw me off balance, so unfortunately I did not get that one.

Immediately after the interview, I had to run frantically again back to work only to get there and have this random co-worker say ‘I saw you when I was driving far far from here running like a mad person in your little red skirt and white blouse, where were you going, what was happening. It looked rather serious like your life depended on it, what was it?‘ to which I responded with a nervous smile and no tangible response with embarrassment rushing all over me that anyone who knew me had seen me in that state.

Ultimately, after possibly two weeks, my uncle told me that he had spoken to his wife’s friend who was a CEO at an NGO and that she would love to meet me for an interview in the next couple of days. When I went for that interview, I was interviewed directly by this CEO and broke all the HR protocol and finally I HAD AN ATTACHMENT!!! (where I could learn, of course) and so the adventure began…

God has a way of orchestrating things in His own ways. It took Him sending an uncle that I had no memory of to suddenly want to spend time with me in order for me to get my work-related learning placement in a place I could actually learn.

There is nothing God cannot do to push you forward in life. The odds may seem against you as they did for me when I had submitted my CV everywhere I knew how to with no response at all.

I even remember at some point getting an interview with a company that wanted someone with a motorbike license and them telling me that if I was willing to learn, they would train me but I had to let that go because Biker-Delsha didn’t sound like the vibe I was about to sign up for. The point is I could now operate in life without the desperation to accept just about anything that came my way just to have something because a destiny helper was sent by God to propel me further.

Proverbs 3:5-6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

Trusting in the Lord means trusting that he will come through for you in ways only He can orchestrate. The solution to your problems may not always come in the way you anticipate but you can rely on God to come through for you because He has a reputation of doing so. This rather long narration of how I had struggled in an area of my life that was time-sensitive is to focus on how God came through for me right on time. My encouragement in closing is that you learn to trust in the Lord. Also, learn to pray for every area of your life, fervently too. Without that, it is highly likely the enemy will frustrate the areas in your life that mean much to you and you will not be able to do anything about it.

Let’s Pray

Holy Spirit, teach us to trust in the Lord and lean not on our own understanding. Teach us also to be vigilant in our prayer life so that we will not find ourselves walking on earth as victims. We also pray that our destiny helpers locate us at the right time. May we walk in victory because You align us with Your will and that we are obedient to your leading. May we rest from toil and enter into a place of productive effort that yields results. May our lives be an inspiration to those who see us as we reflect your kingdom through how we live. Holy Spirit, we particularly pray for anyone reading this blog post that is experiencing any form of despair, may You minister to them and bring them to a place of testimony. Like you came through for me when I needed an attachment, come through for anyone seeking a job or any form of breakthrough. May they testify of Your goodness in the land of the living. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.