so last nite the beautiful val and i flew to kwazulu natal where we met up with dreadlock mike and nancy who we are driving up to botswana with (but that’s another post) and on the plane we got talking to stan who was a friendly-seeming guy sitting next to us [no CATFLAP MAN on this flight…] and got chatting cos we were sodukuing and his wife is an avid sodukuer [stan’s wife, not CATFLAP MAN’s wife, we don’t even know if he has a wife, or if he needs help showing her how to walk in and out of doorways, but that’s another nightly visit…]

so we started chatting about what we do and who we are and eventually it came on to the topic of little stan (whose name was matthew if i recall) and it was a really exciting story to hear – him and his wife had been trying to have a kid for a while and ended up at the doctors and were told that it was impossible (for various reasons which i can’t remember of the medical variety) for them to have children and they got that from three different doctors i think it was (joburg and kzn)

so they were praying about it and trying and nothing and then on two occasions at two different churches with people who didn’t know them or their situation they had two woman come up to them after a service (one was a british lady who was visiting and just happened to end up at the same church having seen it and decided to go in) who came up to them and felt God had told them to tell her that she is going to have a baby – the one lady told them she didn’t know what it meant but during the preach she had seen a light over stan’s head and his wife’s head and then a little light in between the two of them…

then they ended up at another service where the preach was all about leaving your burdens before God and really trusting Him with them and they realised they needed to do that with the whole baby thing cos it had really become a bit of a burden for them and so they left it at the foot of the cross and decided to just trust God [and it turns out that the day they did that she was already pregnant]

stand showed us some really cool pictures of a lively 22 month year old full of energy and smiles – a miracle baby… luck? coincidence? sure, you can think so, but it is a lot harder to explain away God speaking through two different strangers on two different occasions into a situation they knew nothing about and giving an impossible answer to an unlikely question…

i have generally had bad (or weird or uncomfortable) chats with people on airplanes so i generally try and avoid them and focus on getting nine numbers in a square, but i’m really glad we met stan and had our faith built up in the God we serve by an incredible story, and one of just many

He is alive.