I take a step back and soak in my surroundings.
I'm sitting on a stool at a bar in the red light district in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
I'm drinking a Coke Zero and finishing off a brownie and ice cream with my teammate.
We make casual conversation with the bartender, who we have gotten to know over the past week.
The girl who works the front and is hoping to go home with a man tonight, jokes with us in her broken English about how we'll get fat if we eat brownies.
And serenading us all is Uncle Daeng, the Thai man who plays every night at the Rabbit Bar, wearing his cowboy hat and singing his list of Johnny Cash and Beatles songs.
And it hits me, that I feel completely comfortable here. In a place where evil, and sin, and brokenness, and heartache, and heaviness reign, I'm at peace.
It's not the type of peace that makes you sit back, thankful that you know the truth and that you have a hope.
It's a type of peace that makes you sit up, fully aware and alert, where you breathe in Christ's peace and breath out whispers of prayers as you choose to hope for the empty eyes in front of you.
We make plans for the next morning to meet our 2 new friends. This is what we've been hoping for. As we visit the bars each night, we just love each person that crosses our path, perhaps being the only ones that ask them about their families and their lives. As we build relationships with them, we look for opportunities to take them away from the bars for a night, where we can continue to build friendships with them.
We ask our friends what they want to do and discover they want to take us to a Buddhist temple.
So we arrive the next morning on the now quiet bar street and begin our tour of what we later find out is 5 temples.
We had visited 2 temples our second day in Thailand, sent by our contact to observe the religion and worship practices of Buddhism.
But there is something that hits heavy in your stomach when you see your friends enter the temples, purchase flowers and incense and food to offer the idols, and bow down to the Buddha statues.
At the first temple, they tried to get us to buy flowers or to sign the fabric that would be draped around one of the temples. "It's just good luck, it's ok."
When we graciously refused, one turned to us and said, "I know. You're Christians."
We had not made a single reference yet to what we believed in, so I was a liitle shocked that they specified that we were Christians and I wondered what impression they had from other encounters with Christians.
Yes, there was clearly something different about the strange women who kept coming in and ordering coke instead of alcohol, but I wondered what other impressions we were making on them.
As we climbed into the taxi again, I asked, "Do you believe when you die that you come back again as another person?"
"Yes, I believe that. Do you?"
I smiled, "No, I believe that when you die, you either spend eternity forever with God or you spend forever separated from God. And I believe it's not based on whether your good outweighs the bad in your life…but it's about who you believe in…"
We arrived at yet another temple, and our conversation was cut off. And the realization hit me. No amount of words would convince or change minds, and yet we retain the hope that God can change hearts.
Later that night, as I pondered the seemingly impossiblity of a Buddhist becoming a Christ follower, I was reminded that those whom God predestines, He calls, and He is faithful to justify.
Sometimes it seems like an easier thing for me, who grew up in the Bible belt, in a Christian home, with the truth taught to me everyday, to believe the Gospel and to become a follower. But I was just as reliant on God calling me and opening my eyes to the truth. It is no more a difficult thing for Him to open the eyes of a Buddhist, to rescue them out of darkness and bring them into the light. There is just as much hope for my friends because it is Jesus who rescues and redeems and changes hearts.
Some people don't like this realization because it seems to take away our responsibility to spread the Gospel.
But Romans 10:14 says, "How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?"
And read 2 Corinthians 5.
vs 14 "For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all…"
vs 18-19 "All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
vs 20 "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.
