It was 12:30pm on Saturday, September 11 in Zambia’s capital city, Lusaka. 

ITMI’s Steve Evers should have been about to board the third and last flight in the journey home after spending a month visiting and ministering with ITMI partners in South Africa and Zambia.  

Instead, Steve was eating his noon meal at Nando’s, a prolific restaurant chain that thrives on just about every other street corner in the cities of southern Africa. 

The month-long trip had been fraught with logistical entanglements related to COVID-19 and the testing requirements for travel. Travel in Africa is always chaotic, but the COVID testing requirements added insult to injury. 

In order to be allowed to board his flight from Lusaka to Ethiopia, Steve was required to present a negative COVID test from within the past 72 hours. When that test came back positive, he had conceded that he was not going home and would miss his flight on Saturday. 

Steve didn’t know it then, but the Lord had an appointment for him in Lusaka the next day. 

Near the table where Steve sat to eat, a dutiful employee was vigorously flinging a large mop around the floor by the restaurant’s entrance. 

Steve’s stomach turned as he felt a bit of the mop liquid land on his hand…which was resting next to his food. 

So caught up in checking the box and completing the task, the Nando’s employee didn’t realize she was defeating the purpose of mopping by flinging the germs into the food of Nando’s patrons. 

Steve had observed this type of unclear thinking over and over his whole trip. It is a true mental and emotional pandemic that plagues many of the cultures in Africa. So many of the people he came in contact with were so traumatized, that it seemed to fog up their reasoning and cloud their brains.

Their ability to “see” life is murky, reasoning as if in a perpetual life-long cloud. It had been rewarding to see people embrace the Lord and His truth after teaching discipleship material, including the Seven Areas of Life Training (SALT), several times.

Their eyes, both mental and spiritual, are opened as if hearing the truth for the first time. Their thinking immediately became clearer as they embraced the Lord in obedience.

One of the reasons for this particular trip was to teach SALT lessons at a pastor’s conference organized by  ITMI’s Charl van Wyk in South Africa. 

Another attendee of the conference in particular was a leader in the church. She and her daughter had been taken in by their pastor’s family when they escaped a domestic violence situation. 

Years later, she and her daughter still need to live with the pastor’s family. The pastor’s son had impregnated her minor daughter and they were both unsure how to handle the pain they’d suffered. 

As she sat under the Biblical teaching, she understood for the first time that she needed to forgive. She also understood that she needed to manage her finances in a Christ-honoring way by providing for her own family through hard work.

This would keep her family from being at the mercy of others, who may or may not demonstrate godly lifestyles. Understanding these truths brought unprecedented clarity and peace to her mind and soul. 

This story of trauma and abuse is just a tiny representation of what lies just below the surface of untold millions of African lives.

Never one to miss a teaching moment, Steve asked the young Nando’s worker to stop mopping and explained that she was flinging floor dust and particles into his food. 

Steve was detained in Zambia by the positive COVID test, so he had time to share an observation with Nando's leadership. He asked another employee if he could speak to the restaurant manager. 

With much fear and dread in the employee's eyes, she went to find the person in charge. Frank came to Steve's table with slumped shoulders, and a down-trodden countenance. 

Steve asked Frank to please sit down, which is quite irregular in Africa culture. Again, Steve seemed internally compelled to help this manager see beyond the normally beneficial activity of mopping to something larger. 

As Steve explained, Frank acknowledged that the way she was mopping was counterproductive to the purpose of creating a clean environment. This gave Steve the opportunity to help Frank see that even the things we think are good things to do, might not be what God says are actually good in His Word.

Frank thought he would be saved because he’d “done some good things” but Steve was able to help Frank see that as he was wrong about the mopping, he might also be wrong about how to find salvation.

Steve led Frank to see that salvation doesn’t come through doing good things, but, as God’s Word says, through faith alone in Jesus. 

Frank gave His life to Jesus right there in the Lusaka fast food dining room. After exchanging contact information with Steve, Frank walked away with tears in his eyes and a new man!

This, of course, was why Steve needed to remain in Lusaka for a couple extra days and why his COVID test came back positive before his originally scheduled departure. What had seemed like total chaos - missed flights and all their complications - was actually divinely orchestrated purpose. 

Frank, the new believer, and his wife, Charity.