[This is a story from Amanda Ganyo, one of our missionaries in Ghana. She and her husband, Austin, serve with Training Tomorrow’s Leaders.]
In our ministry, the ultimate test of our planning skills is when we have teams come from our supporting churches to serve on short-term mission trips. I prepare the menu, make the shopping list for the market, organize ladies to come and help me cook, and make room assignments for the guests. My husband Austin plans their itinerary, organizes and purchases plane tickets, makes sure transportation is ready and available, gathers project supplies, and so much more. Before they arrive, every little detail is planned out. This past January, we had a team from one of our supporting churches in North Carolina come to help work on a church building and provide free medical clinics to some of our communities. We traveled with them to Yendi, a city located about an hour and a half drive from where we live in Tamale. The plan was to stay at a guesthouse there, and then travel out to the different villages during the day to complete the various projects. We had checked out the guest house weeks before the team’s arrival to make sure it was safe, clean, and available for our group to use during their visit. However when we arrived with the team, it quickly became obvious that the owner of the guesthouse had not been honest with us on our initial tour. While the rooms reserved for our visitors were fine, we realized that part of the guesthouse was being used as a brothel. Prostitutes had rooms that were reserved for them, and men would be visiting them at all hours of the day. As my plans were blowing up, so many thoughts raced through my mind—What will our visitors think? Are we safe? What kind of dangerous people will the brothel attract? Despite our reservations, we had no other choice but to stay there. And God moved.
The very first Sunday we were there, one of the prostitutes named Baby came to tell us that she wanted to come to church with us. During the church service, she came forward and gave her life to Christ and then was baptized later that evening. When we saw her the next morning, her make up, the fake nails, her promiscuous clothing were all gone. She told us that she no longer wanted to be called “Baby” but now she would go by the name “Peace” because at the worst point in her life, God had brought her peace. With her door now closed to her male clients, she spent the rest of our time there with us, helping to work on the church building and helping with the medical clinics. And when we left, she came with us. It turned out that she was trafficked to Ghana from Nigeria, lured under the false pretense of a job and forced into prostitution. We were able to help her travel back to Nigeria to be reunited with her family.
To be honest, if we had known ahead of time that the guest house we wanted to rent for our team was being used as a brothel, we never would have stayed there. But Peace will testify that God brought us there for her, to help rescue her from a life that she never wanted and be reconciled to Christ. What I have learned in more than a decades’s worth of missions work is that serving God isn’t about our accomplishments or the plans we have made, but about being flexible and following God as he moves in ways we could never have dreamed or imagined. Proverbs 19:21 tells us that “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” How blessed we are to be servants in God’s Kingdom, and to be used as vessels to reveal His perfect plan for our lives and ministry. May we never see ourselves or our plans as so important that we miss out on the greater opportunities that God has so graciously put before us.