What Are The Odd's?

Dear Friends,

A few weeks ago, Laila and I were in Ottawa, Canada, leading a conference at an Arabic church. We did not know a single person in that room. Not one.

On the second day, at lunch, a young woman came and sat down at our table. She looked at us for a moment and said, “Are you connected to MELTI? The curriculum you are teaching... that’s a MELTI curriculum.”

I said, “Yes.”

She said, “Do you know Botros?”

Botros is our training director. So I said, “Yes. We know Botros.”

Her whole face changed. “Then let me tell you what MELTI has done in my life.”

Her name is Rita. She is Iraqi. Nine years ago, she fled her country and arrived in Jordan as a refugee, with nothing certain ahead of her. And in Jordan, she met Jesus.

For three years, she told us, she was discipled through MELTI, course after course. “I grew in my faith,” she said. “I loved every single course. I love MELTI.”

Then, five months ago, after nine years of waiting, the United Nations finally resettled her in Ottawa.

And here is what she said next. She has been in a new country for only five months, and she looked at us and said, “I want to start a discipleship institute here in Ottawa. Because of what MELTI did in me.”

We did not know Rita. We had never heard her name. She was never in a letter or a report. For three years, God was shaping her life through this ministry, through your giving and your prayers, and we had no idea.

This is how the gospel travels. It went from Iraq to Jordan to Canada. It did not follow our strategic plan. We never sat in a board meeting and said, “Let us reach Ottawa.” But God did not ask our permission. We plant a seed in Amman, the wind of the Spirit picks it up, and years later we find it growing in a place we have never been.

Nobody asked Rita to start an institute. We did not recruit her. She was discipled, and now she cannot keep it to herself. That is what happens when someone is truly discipled: they go and do for others what was done for them.

When Rita finished her story, Laila and I just looked at each other. We came to Ottawa to teach, and God arranged that lunch to teach us. He wanted us to see, with our own eyes, one stalk of wheat from a field we did not know we had planted.

How many Ritas are there? I don’t know. That is the point. We are not looking for more institutes. We are looking for more Ritas.

My prayer is that there will be so many of them that we keep meeting them by accident, in cities we never planned to visit, at lunch tables where we thought we knew no one.

Thank you for being part of Rita's story.

Wahid and Laila Wahba