A few short weeks ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in Rangoon, watching the storm roll in from the southwest. The already threatening skies were getting darker by the minute as massive towers of black clouds bore down upon us.

It was the rainy season in Rangoon, not the best time of the year for a Westerner to visit. We had experienced rain every day since our arrival the Sunday before—not the refreshing spring showers that would have brought relief from the heat, but torrential downpours that flooded the streets and blocked any hope of seeing downtown from the top floor of the hotel. I could tell from its rapid advance, this latest storm was driven by some pretty impressive winds. For just an instant, images of Cyclone Nargis flashed across my mind, but somehow I managed to turn the entire scene over to the Lord before it crippled my resolve.

When the first sheets of rain hit the wall of windows, visibility dropped to practically nothing. Even at mid-day, the skies were black as night outside. The wind whistled around the corners of the six-story building with a mournful howl and drove the rain towards our window at an angle no window was ever intended to withstand.

When it hit, the rain overflowed the window sill and ran down the inside of the wall. I grabbed a couple of bath towels and began mopping as fast as I could. Even then, I was barely able to keep the water off the floor. I had seen windows let water in like this only once before—when a tornado headed straight at our house and then swerved in time to miss us, but still raised havoc a half mile to the north. There was no tornado in this storm, just straight winds flying at us on the horizontal.

I must have been working on my third towel when I started complaining to myself that we had picked a fine time to come—during Southeast Asia’s monsoon season! To make matters worse, the e-mails we received from the home front boasted of Tulsa’s unseasonably cool weather—we were stuck in a hot, sultry part of the world, having to cope with wall-to-wall rain!

I couldn’t help but smile as the Spirit brought to mind what I’d seen earlier in the eyes of each of the pastors who traveled— some of them for days—to attend our seminar on Inductive Bible Study. Rainy season or not, this was the day the Lord intended. For months, we had been praying He would bring the people he wanted, and that was exactly what He had done. No one was there by accident. And each was getting exactly what God intended for him to get from the teaching. If it happened to be at a time that required our enduring the incessant rain, then so be it. God’s timing is always perfect! Who am I to complain?

Experience teaches that Satan will interfere with God’s work when and wherever he can. And the more important the mission, the greater the interference. Many obstacles had been placed in our path before we ever stepped on the plane to Rangoon. How silly of me to think that Satan would give up the fight so easily and leave us alone once we landed!

Torrents of rain? Leaky windows? Oppressive heat? Ha! How could a little discomfort keep us from carrying out God’s plan for these precious people? After all, they’d come from all over Myanmar to learn how to study the Bible and God wasn’t going to let them down now!