A blog post from one of our College Small Group Leaders on her Short-Term Global Trip to East Asia…
__________
As I sat around the dinner table that night in a country where so many have never once heard the Gospel, my heart was pierced in such a way that I fought to keep from weeping four times over. While the beauty of the gospel moved my soul to praise, the blinded eyes of Belle’s heart flooded my own with great sorrow. I willed and prayed that my new friend’s heart would be opened as she listened to the story of God’s redemption, of the Christ who set me free. Further proof of the truth – which by God’s own hand she was diligently seeking – was her stumbling block. She still insisted that she must witness miracles and travel the world to search for God before she could find Him and believe.
God’s sovereign hand was clearly at work, as evidenced by the fact that a couple of recent graduates from Birmingham were dining with a new friend in a part of the world that is “unreached” with the Gospel. For my college roommate and I, it was our first time in the country that was once known as “the land of God.” Only by His grace were we able to come and partner with a missionary family to share the gospel with university students in a city of 6 million. As for Belle, she was a student we met the evening before during an English corner at a nearby university.
Though Belle was not a believer, she knew about God. The missionary asked Belle if she would mind sharing her story – how she had come to know what she did. Belle told us of how she had travelled to Canada with friends and met someone who had told her about God and given her a Bible. We listened intently to the ways in which God had already been faithfully working in her life. Even in all her searching, she had so many doubts remaining, so many questions that plagued her. One of her questions, she wanted to know why it was that God used the rib of a man to make woman; why was it necessary to make her come from him rather than simply using the dirt as He had for man? Another question she had was why – if God was so loving – could He allow for it to take so long for the Gospel to begin to reach her country, her people? So many who were educated had never heard… and what about those who were uneducated, who lived out in villages? They did and would die every day without ever hearing.
God blessed the three of us immeasurably those couple of hours as we ate together, sipped tea, and spent time sharing with Belle. God spoke the truth of Ezekiel 11 to her through us – that God was the one who would give her a believing heart, one that had faith in Him. My roommate and I witnessed the grace and love of God in the missionary as God used her to share truth after truth from His Word with Belle. Though she felt she must go search the world for God, the missionary called her to consider how God was bringing the world to her. With tears in her eyes, we begged Belle to consider the urgency of eternity, whether she would spend it with God or separated from Him. Our hearts were occasioned to cry out again as Belle told us that she still needed more… more proof, more time to process, more opportunity to read in her Bible. We committed to her that we would pray diligently for her, that God by His grace in His sovereignty would give her a believing heart – through whatever ways and in whatever timing He should choose.
Were I to recount the many opportunities in which God allowed us to share the Gospel in our time oversees this summer, many hours would pass and pages would fill. However, it is in the recounting of them that I see the faithful hand of God at work in my own heart and life. God used our time in an unreached context in many ways:
(1) to teach me in greater depth what it means to be a part of the body of Christ and to live in community
(2) to remind me of the urgency of the gospel
(3) to teach me that every moment in my life can be used intentionally for sharing the gospel
(4) to drive home the truth that God’s blessing is not separated from obedience
(5) to teach me that I am completely dependent upon God’s Spirit and power in every single moment
(6) to teach me the importance of sharing the whole of God’s story – from creation, to what Christ lives to do for us in this very moment, to what He will do for us in time to come
(7) to grow my passion for the nations
(8) to show me the necessity of living out life with others in order to be able to make disciples.
Since I have returned from that far-away land, I often find myself sipping a cup of jasmine green tea. In those moments I look back upon the several days in my journey of faith in which God directed my path to share life and the gospel with Belle and fellow university students. And I pray fervently still that God will deliver them from darkness. I thankfully consider how God enables our obedience and then works through it… and how He is working to make His glory known and call His people out from among all nations.