What If?
Written By: Shari Tvrdik
On the far side of the sea, I found a people.
A people so different from me that I often wondered how we could be the same species.
A people so similar to me that I swore I was looking in a mirror.
A people I envied for a strength and resourcefulness I new nothing about.
A people I scolded for a bitter harsh coldness that stung the spirit.
They were God’s people before I arrived, because He had created them, designed them, and died for them.
He had already saved them.
My work was to tell them they were saved. All they had to do was believe it.
The work of a missionary is just that simple.
Entering the room with the Good News, into a room full already of stories long told, cultures untouched, unreached hearts. In the center of that room, you unwrap the biggest story.
THE STORY,
and then you watch what God will do.
In turn, you are reached by the unreached.
God uses them to change the missionary.
And that is exactly what happened to me.
After eight years together with these people I once called “the poor”, I grew. My mind opened up, and so did my heart.
I learned, I changed.
And then I returned home to the USA.
My work today merely hints at adventure. The ordinary routine brings no danger and sometimes, I’ll admit, it can feel a bit mundane.
But I still see God here because I’m always looking for where He is working and I’m desperate to carry the Gospel to that place.
The Gospel must be carried.
Together, we Believers were meant to carry it.
This morning, I was reminded again of the mandate of the Great Commission when I received some pictures from a beautiful friend who was born in the country I called “foreign”. She was raised in the place I didn’t know existed until I was into my middle life. There, we met as neighbors and she taught me how to live without running water, and how to make a diet of food I disliked. She was the first of the unreached to Believe she was saved and she grasped the message of Jesus as if it were a life raft thrown to her just before drowning. She spent her life since, carrying the Gospel to her own people.
She wrote:
“There was a fire in the Bogd mountain today ... actually nearer to our home area ... the whole city could see the smoke.”
“Hundreds of people ... volunteered…..they recognized they needed to act so they made a human chain to bring water up to the mountain.”
“and they put the fire out….together. “
As I read my friends words I was brought to tears. The picture of these men and women seeing the fire and running to it.
None of them had fire hoses, or what I image was ideal to put out a fire on a mountain….and the water was passed up the mountain in a long chain made of men and women who had to act.
If one or two would have gathered…..it would have been hopeless. Even twenty or fifty would not have made the human chain of water go as far as it needed, but because hundreds rushed to the fire, it worked.
They put it out together.
Our world, God’s world is on fire.
We must see that.
Anne Voskamp wrote:
"No one wants to cry fire too soon — but only fools keep smiling blithely when their hair is on fire.
When your world is on fire you burn a path straight to the only Living Water and you throw yourself into the only well that can make us well. “
What if,
what if we all together ran with the Gospel, the true Gospel…ran for the world with the good news that they are saved.
What if it wasn’t one or two or ten or twenty of us….
What if all God’s people put the fire out…together.
Acts 13:47
For this is what the Lord has commanded us: "'I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.'"
