A peculiar encounter.

As I sat on an old, rickety wooden bench at a road-side food stand, waiting for the woman inside to finish frying the egg which would become the sole contents of a less-than-impressive sandwich that I was about to chew up and swallow, an acquaintance from the neighborhood came to rest beside me. We happen to meet in this very place quite often, as neither of us has at home the fortune of an obedient, well-behaved wife that can cook and, of course, clean—the desire of most African men I have met.

“Good evening,” I said to the man. “How are you?”

“By His grace,” came the reply, as a fiery grin illuminated his face, showing clearly the large chip which, quite unfortunately, had made one of his two front teeth a jagged and unhappy half of what it once was. I understood the man’s words perfectly, as he had spoken them in response to every greeting I had ever sent his way. But to you, they may seem a bit strange. Let me briefly explain.

The people of Ghana are generally very religious, with the majority practicing a loud, intense, and intrusive kind of Christianity which is seen, heard and felt in all areas of both public and private life. Most people respond to greetings, regardless of the type or the time of day that they are offered, with, “By the grace of God, I am fine” or “By the grace of the Almighty Jesus Christ, I’m doing very well,” to which the initial greeter responds, “Thank God.” Walk down the street at any time of day and you will hear these exchanges, almost exactly as I have just presented them, taking place all around you. It is quite fascinating. Due to a kind of laziness to which most men are susceptible, the standard response to a greeting has been cut down to, simply, “By His grace”—the very words that this man spoke to me that night while sitting at the side of the road. Now, back to the story.

This particular night happened to be a rather cold one, with the clear, star-filled sky above made slightly imperfect by sporadic, swift-moving blemishes of thin, wispy gray clouds, and the wind a constant, unwanted companion.

“It is cold tonight,” said the man.

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” I replied. Tilting my head up towards the magnificent, black void above us, I added, “I would even love to see it rain, though it won’t happen tonight. The sky is clear.”

“But it can still rain!” said the man quickly and with a sense of surety in his voice.

As I sat there for the next few seconds, thinking back to my early years of elementary education when I learned all about the weather, including things like thunder, lightning, clouds, evaporation and rain, I thought to myself: no it can’t. I suddenly became curious at what motivated this man to make such a claim, which, in my mind, seemed quite absurd.

“We know that it rains when there are clouds in the sky, but that is only science,” he said. “It’s just a guy’s prediction. Someone predicted it and said it’s true. In the Bible, God says that any time a rainbow appears, it means it is about to rain. This is always true because it is one of God’s promises, but God didn’t say that clouds have to be in the sky in order for the rain to fall. That is just science, but it’s not one of God’s promises. So it can happen. It can even rain right now.”

Looking back up to the sky above, which, by this point, was completely! clear, I searched for some kind of divine intervention to help me make sense of the unbelievable words just spoken to me (intervention, I must note, from a God much different than the one who told this man that rainbows unfailingly signal the coming of rain). I found nothing, and at that moment, the only thought in my mind, quite ironically, was Ohhh Jesus! I simply replied, “Oh, ok. Interesting,” and left it at that.