Cost of Following

This month we have partnered with Campus Crusade at Cape Coast University 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 and friends 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.”