Lots of Tanzanian churches, particularly Pentecostal ones, have time during their Sunday service for testimonies of how God worked in people's lives during the past week. People often share about how they were sick and God brought them through it or how he gave them safe travel. Of course there are others, but those are the type I've heard the most often.
During Ikizu Bible Weekend (see previous posts), the church we were at had a testimony time during the afternoon service. Mixed in with the healings and journeys accomplished, there were two testimonies that stood out to me, for quite different reasons. Due to the length of them, I'll make them two different blog posts. The first:
One woman stood up and shared how she had been at the morning service, during which Andrew, the two Ikizu translators, and I presented about the value of the Bible and Bible translation. She had purchased a copy of the gospel of Luke in Ikizu after the service, and then she'd gone home for lunch before returning for the afternoon service.
Upon arriving home, she told the congregation, she'd gone to visit her father-in-law (it seemed that he either lived very close to her home or perhaps with her family), who was a very elderly Ikizu man, and not a believer. She reminded the church that she and her husband had not been successful at trying to speak with him about Christ, although they had been trying for years.
She told her father-in-law that she had something she thought he might like to see, since he was an Ikizu man who valued his language and culture. She handed him the book of Luke and started teaching him how to read it, using the little literacy booklet we'd given away that morning. He could read in Swahili, but Ikizu is written with seven vowels and so requires some instruction at first. She said he'd swatted her away and snapped that if it was really written in Ikizu, he could figure out how to read it himself, since he knew Ikizu better than she did. At that point, people in the church laughed, so I guess he might be a bit of a crotchety man with a reputation around the village. She then had to go prepare lunch for her family, so left him with the book. But, before returning back to church in the afternoon, she checked on him again, and she said he was sitting exactly where she'd left him, and was quite engrossed in reading Luke! She begged the people of the church to pray that reading the gospel in his own language would grab his heart, and he'd believe in Jesus before he died.
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