Messages given at various Camps Farthest Out by Javan Ommani
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Speaking to the 1985 International CFO, gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, Javan Ommani recalls his arrest in Kenya on a charge of preaching unlawfully. He closes with a professor’s challenge to his students: it is not enough to know the answer, you must know that you know it.
At the Arizona CFO in 1988, Javan Ommani retells his refusal, alongside an American missionary, to drink a village elder’s offering of blood mixed with milk. He then reads the Easter account of Mary weeping at the empty tomb to describe stepping into what he calls the new and living way.
Javan Ommani retells the story of Mephibosheth, who was dropped and lamed by a frightened nurse. He sets it beside his own hungry, malnourished childhood and his mother’s daily prayers, which carried him into a seat in Kenya’s government. He warns listeners not to drop the child, the stranger, or the small gift in their hands, a lesson he preached at the Iowa CFO in 2001.
At the 2001 Iowa CFO, Javan Ommani credits an all night prayer meeting with the release of the apostle Peter from prison. He then turns to two testimonies of forgiveness he heard among orphans in Rwanda and Burundi: a widow forgave her husband’s killer, and a girl forgave the men who killed her parents.
Javan Ommani tells how a friend’s testimony after a prayer meeting in a mud walled house led to his own conversion and baptism in April 1962. To the Iowa CFO in 2001 he brought that story alongside the burning bush of Moses, an ordinary thing God sets alight to call attention. When a market crowd in Kenya would not stop to listen, he preached the gospel instead to a passing chicken.
Javan Ommani describes a malaria fever that broke, as he had prayed it would, just before his flight to the Iowa CFO in 2001. He then turns to his years carrying bread and water to refugees who fled Idi Amin’s Uganda, telling them their names were “graven,” in Isaiah’s words, in the palms of God’s hands. The joy those refugees found, he says, had nothing to do with their circumstances improving.
These travel stories are the surprises of walking with God, Javan Ommani tells the Iowa CFO in 2001. Stranded and unmet at a Seattle airport, he hears a passing stranger say, “smile, Jesus loves you.” Later, in Lagos, a man named Emmanuel appears to shelter him and a fellow traveler after a coup shuts them out of their hotel.