Cost of Following

This month we have partnered with Campus Crusade at Cape CoastUniversity in Ghana.  Our ministry for the next three weeks is basically to build relationships with the students and share the gospel with them. Hanging out with college students.  Fun, right?  Knocking on doors and starting random conversations.  Awkward, right?  Making new friends that are hospitable, engaging, smart, and speak English.  Worth the trip, right?

Today was our second day on the campus.  Josh Woodmansee and I first checked in on our new friends from yesterday-they weren’t home-before knocking, entering, and meeting Emmanuel, Darius, and Holy.  Ghanaians are so hospitable that we were seated and engaged in full conversation within a minute.  Our discussions ranged from talking about being justified by faith to challenging each other to a game of table tennis.  We conversed about the prayer life of Jacob one moment and in the next laughed about how the bracelets I received as gifts while in Nicaragua are interpreted in Ghana to mean that I am mystical or magical.  Overall it was encouraging to discuss deep, complex Christian topics with solid believers raised thousands of miles away from the US borders.

Emmanuel was the most impressed with our journey demonstrated through his questions regarding the difficulties of the Race.  He also asked us if we had faced resistance when sharing the gospel.  We told him that while not everyone has been receptive, they have been respectful and extremely courteous all over the world.  After it was clear that something was building inside of him, he asked us the question:  What is your motivation for going on the World Race?  Josh and I both shared why we were on the Race, but then I stopped and made something clear to him.  The cost of following Christ for us is well-worth the sacrifices of comfort and separation from family andfriends for a period of time.  Meeting “Emmanuels” all over the world has encouraged our faith and is payment enough.  After our responses he told us that he wanted to support us financially.  It might be a World Race first that a youth we were ministering to desired to support us.  We told him that instead it would bless us to be able to hang out with him and his friends over the next few weeks.

After exchanging cell phone numbers our time in G-213 came to an end because I was scheduled for a haircut.  The day before we had spent several hours with Frank, Bruce, and Gideon just down the hall.  In order to understand our time with them yesterday, think back to freshmen year of college hanging out in the dorms.  In between playing FIFA-soccer video game-looking at pictures, joking around, meeting multiple visitors interested by the white people, and laughing more than I had in months, we talked about our faith, asked about theirs, prayed with them, and invited them to a Crusade going on that evening on campus.  (Two of the guys that came with us accepted Christ as their Savior that night.)  Yesterday Frank offered to cut my hair and tonight I was taking him up on the offer.

Frank is one of those unique characters that tells foreign visitors that he supervised Obama during the presidential visit to Ghana, and that he is personal friends with John Grisham.  He knows how to joke, but when I approached him today for my haircut he stepped into my personal space like Ghanaians do and asked, “Are you serious?”  For the next forty minutes the air on the 2^nd Floor of G Block was filled with laughter and my hair particles.  As for the crowd, let’s just say the spectacle didn’t go unnoticed.  Frank used a box cutter blade pressed on top of a comb to give me a buzz cut that I was told looked “cute.”  (I explained that guys don’t call each other cute in America, nor do they hold hands.  They found that odd.)  Near the end of the hysterics one guy asked if we were going to invite them to a program now.  When we told them, “No,” and that we looked forward to seeing them on Monday, their facial expressions showed they understood that we truly desired to build relationships with them.  Our new friends are fun, inquisitive, and gracious.  (They offered to fetch me a bucket of water to wash the hair off with since the water had gone off, which it does sporadically, sometimes for days, throughout the city during dry season.)

In the book of Matthew Jesus talks about the cost of following Him.  His first response is, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”  Leaving home and relocating every month for a year definitely has its negatives. Persecution and Christianity are practically synonymous.  (Have you seen the news about Nigeria recently?)  Christ even says that a prophet is not welcome in his own town, but following the Great Commission is not an unfulfilling path.  There’s a cost to following Jesus, but there’s also huge rewards along the way.  Step out.  It’s so much more than just being “worth it.”