Seasons of Surrender

Stranded in Togo, God Gave Us Peace We Couldn’t Explain

Our mission work in Togo was done and our bags were packed when the COVID tests came back positive. Flights canceled. Borders closed. Quarantine stretched to nearly double. Nothing about our situation improved — and somewhere in that locked room, God handed us a peace that made no sense at all.

Soft curtains framing the view of a developing country's cityscape. Image created with Canva.

We weren’t supposed to stay.

Our mission work in Togo had concluded, our bags were packed, and our return flights were scheduled. We were tired in the good way that follows meaningful work, and we were ready to head home. Then the routine COVID testing required for travel came back positive for several of us. Our flights were canceled. Borders closed in front of us. And suddenly we weren’t delayed or mildly inconvenienced — we were locked down, indefinitely, in a foreign country that didn’t yet know what its own protocols were.

We were told to quarantine for ten days before we could test again. We didn’t know where we’d be allowed to stay, how long we’d be there, or when we’d be permitted to leave the country. Communication with home was limited, and the anxieties of our families — along with our jobs and business obligations — multiplied in the silence. Information was inconsistent. Every plan we tried to form depended on someone else’s decision, someone else’s approval, someone else’s timeline. The government was enforcing rules it was still writing, which made trusting our fate to its hands difficult. Our illusion of control disappeared fast.

At first, we did what most people do. We hunted for solutions that would get us home quicker — our contact could only move our flights to fourteen days out, past the minimum. We tried to manage our thoughts, distract ourselves, stay positive. But isolation strips away pretense, and within a few days the emotional toll was undeniable. We fought the urge to snap at one another as each of us began unraveling internally. Depression crept in. Motivation drained. The silence from home felt louder than any noise. We were physically safe, and internally we were not well.

The question that convicted me

About eight days into that first quarantine, during a conversation with the team, someone asked what the Lord had been speaking to us.

I didn’t have an answer. And the realization convicted me — not because God wasn’t speaking, but because I hadn’t been listening. Weeks before the trip I had asked God to help me focus on Him again, to quiet the noise, to bring me back to attentiveness. And here I sat with every distraction stripped away, still struggling to sit with Him.

I retreated to my room with my journal and asked His forgiveness — not out of guilt, but out of clarity. And there, in the stillness I had been resisting, God met me.

The circumstances hadn’t changed. We were still quarantined, still waiting, still without answers. But something shifted. Joy returned — not excitement, not relief, but joy: the settled sense of being exactly where I was meant to be for that season. The place that had felt foreign and restrictive began to feel like home. The landscape took on a beauty it hadn’t had the day before — not because it improved, but because I had surrendered. That day marked a turning point for all of us.

Peace that didn’t match the circumstances

The days that followed were not easier in any practical sense. Plans kept falling apart. Testing dates arrived and failed results followed. Timelines stretched, setbacks stacked, and nothing moved forward. But something had changed inside us. We stopped forcing outcomes. We stopped measuring success by escape. We stopped resisting where we were.

And peace settled in — not because we understood what God was doing, and not because anything resolved, but because we finally opened our tightly clenched fists and trusted Him. It was the quiet kind of shift that comes as you learn to recognize God’s guidance in everyday life.

We began to see opportunities instead of obstacles: moments to encourage one another, chances to bless the few people we encountered. Joy surfaced naturally — no longer a coping mechanism but a genuine response to God’s presence. Our laughter wasn’t distraction; it was overflow. And the people around us noticed. They expected us to be miserable, anxious, defeated. Instead they found us content, grounded, present, spreading joy wherever we had the chance.

Scripture came alive in those days — not as verses we clung to for reassurance, but as confirmation of what we were living. God was fighting battles we couldn’t fight and holding us steady while He did it. One ancient promise to a trapped and frightened people fit our locked room exactly:

“Yahweh will fight for you, and you shall be still.”— Exodus 14:14 (World English Bible)

Eventually, after nearly double the required quarantine period, we tested again — and just as quietly as the delay had begun, it ended. We were cleared to go home.

The delay wasn’t the lesson

Looking back, I understand now that the delay itself was never the lesson. The peace was. God didn’t rush us out of there, didn’t explain Himself ahead of time, didn’t hand control back to us. He stayed with us — and we learned that His control over our lives is all we actually need.

That season reshaped my understanding of peace. Peace is not certainty, and it is not control. Peace is the presence of God when everything else is uncertain. It didn’t come from understanding. It came from surrender — a lesson God deepened in me again, having begun years earlier, in a campus parking lot.

Sometimes being on mission means working through human plans to serve others. And sometimes being on mission means learning to rest so deeply in God’s presence that His joy becomes the testimony. That season taught me that peace does not need to make sense to be real — and that God can be trusted not just to deliver us from difficulty, but to hold us within it.