Pray for Rain!

It's rainy season in Ethiopia, when for about three months straight it usually rains every day. The abundance of rain during this time gets the country through the rest of the dry months of the year. During my early time in Addis, it only rained about two days out of every three, and that never for very long. Sometimes there were two or three days in a row without rain. I was given to understand that this is very unusual. After a couple weeks of an unusually dry rainy season, some began to be concerned. I heard that it hadn't been this dry since just before the last big famine, when the lack of rain caused many to die of starvation.

Steve brought this before the class on Tuesday, and we prayed for rain. Fifteen minutes later, what I can only describe as a storm descended on Addis. Never have I seen so much rain. It even began to hail. It continued to rain for a couple of hours, God's life-giving rain sweeping away much of the filth of the streets of Addis. Wednesday and Thursday we prayed for rain, and Wednesday and Thursday God set loose the rainclouds on Ethiopia.

This is a very different post than it would have been had I composed it before Tuesday, before I saw God's repeated acts of faithfulness on behalf of his servants in Ethiopia. Praise God who is not far from the prayers of His people!

Please pray that God would continue to bring rain upon Ethiopia, so that our brothers and sisters there would have enough to eat. "The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months. Then he prayed again, and the sky poured rain and the earth produced its fruit." James 5:16-18