Before leaving on the World Race I was blessed with the opportunity to attend the Urbana 2015 Mission Conference in St. Louis. It was exciting to be able to be a part of an event encouraging the pursuit of God’s mission in the world knowing I would be leaving for the field within a week. Urbana was confirming, encouraging and a blessing to partake in, but God also presented me with a challenge.
In Matthew 9:36, the scripture, talking about Jesus says, “When He saw the crowds, he had compassion for them…” One of the speakers pointed out that before Jesus had compassion He first saw the crowds. She challenged us saying that we do not have a compassion problem, but we have a seeing problem.
Through other speakers and seminars God opened my heart to realize I have a seeing problem. The first group that I was blind to were my black brothers and sisters. As a Northwestern white American I believed that racism was a thing of the past. But the truth of it is racism is more than just my personal feelings toward another person; it is a matter of systems and institutions and a way of thinking that is so deeply ingrained in us we don’t even recognize it. (Check out links below for more information.)
The other group my eyes were opened to is the persecuted church. We were blessed to hear directly from some leaders of the persecuted church and I realized that I had completely forgotten about my brothers and sisters suffering everyday to proclaim the name of Christ. Do you know what the persecuted church’s greatest requests is? It is that we would pray for them. Consider what Jesus said after seeing and having compassion on the crowds, “Then he said to His disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.'” Matthew 9:37-38.
I sometimes wonder about the people in history that watched horrible acts of injustice occur around them and I will ask myself why they did nothing and what would I have done. History, though is already written and unchangeable, so I think the more important question is what am I doing now? Through Urbana God helped me realize that we still live in a broken world and there are still injustices across the world and in my backyard. This brokenness is too big for me to fix, (even my own brokenness is beyond my ability to fix). As I am beginning this 11 month journey God is reminding me He is big enough and challenging me to remember in prayer the injustices in the world while also asking that He gives me His eyes to see the unseen.
Links to the Urbana seminars God used to open my eyes
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