You Never Know

When I first went to Peru in 2012, I was truly overwhelmed by the whole experience. There was one picture that was taken of me with a little girl in the village of Lida that always captured my attention. Something about the look on her face always drew my eyes. I didn't know her name, and I truly didn't think I would ever see her again. But I can tell you that for years, I would look through my pictures from that first trip and pray for her.

In 2019, while I was teaching English that year, one day it suddenly dawned on me that one of my students looked familiar. There was a girl in first year of secondary (7th grade equivalent) whose uncle had come from that village. She came to study at the school because there wasn't a secondary school in her village. I went home and found this picture. Then I took it to her uncle and asked him, "Is this Leslye?". He looked at it just for a moment and almost immediately said, "YES!". I had been teaching the same little girl I had been praying for a long time for months and never recognized that it was the same one.

One of the truly remarkable things about this story is, because of our group's continued communication with the people of her village, her uncle attended the pastors school run by the Arimborgos (the family I live with). His connection with them then allowed for Leslye to be able to attend the secondary school when she most likely wouldn't have been able to continue her education otherwise. You see, because there isn't a secondary school in her village, if students want to continue their education past elementary school there they have to go somewhere else to live. So, many of them simply stop after elementary school. Not only our prayers, but continued effort by a group of people working where seeds were planted, gave her an opportunity to continue her education.

Often, we think that our prayers go unanswered, but the truth is that we just don’t always see the full effects of our work and prayers on this side of heaven. On these rare occasions that we get to see the fruits of some of our prayers, we should recognize it as encouragement to continue praying even when we don’t know the end results.