Over the last few weeks I have been living in a small town in Malaysia. The moment we got to our location I accidentally passed out on the hard cool floor. No sleeping pad or sleeping bag or pillow. Just a random cushion (jet lag was rough.) A few of my teammates came bag carrying many plastic bags of food saying,
“So we got breakfast for everyone and we don’t know what it is.”
It was delicious.
We are on a new team
with new people
on a new continent
with food I’ve never seen in my life.
Three major cultures.
Malaysian, Indian, and Chinese.
Three major cultures
that usually don’t interact.
Things are very different from my first four months to say the least.
For those who do not know, Malaysia is primarily a Muslim nation. I’ve been to one Islamic country in the past, and loved it. The people were so welcoming and friendly and I couldn’t get enough when it came to learning about their culture. One of the only things I knew about Malaysia before showing up was that it was in the 1040 window. That basically means the majority of the people not only aren’t Christians, but they’ve never heard the good news before. Not once.
I thought to myself, “Regardless of what type of ministry we have, we can still make friends and share the gospel in our own free time.”
Wrong.
Turns out it is illegal to share the gospel with any Malaysian Muslim.
And to top that off, we were warned against sharing for the sake of avoiding drawing more attention to ourselves and preserving what our host has built up.
Seriously, it’s pretty easy to draw attention to yourself here when you’re the only white people in town and you’re not wearing a hijab. All you have to do is walk down the street and a total stranger might run up and ask to take a photo with you.
At one point Nayelly and I decided to take a little weekend trip to an island called Langkawi. We had a lot of fun getting to swim, go island hopping, picking up some food from the night market, and sitting at those little tables on the beach with loads of candles and live music.
I was on the beach having some time with God the next morning. I was talking to him about how badly I wanted to tell people about him. I was thinking I should have taken advantage of the fact that I was on an island, far enough from the ministry site, mostly surrounded by European tourists. But I only had two or three hours left there. As I was going on this tangent in my head, I felt that God was saying, “It’s your time off. You don’t have to worry about ministering to other people. But if someone else comes up to you, be ready.”
This basically resulted in me asking God to bring someone to me.
Less than a minute later some guy that asked me to watch his stuff on the beach came back from his swim.
“What are you doing?” he said looking at how I had my prayer journal, some notebooks, and Bible all sprawled out on the sand around me.
“I’m praying,” I said.
“You pray with a journal?”
“Yeah, I use it as a tool to help me out when I’m distracted. So if I have trouble focusing my mind on what I want to say, I can write it down before reflecting on it and expressing it to God. Then when God responds, I write down His words with a red pen.” The red pen idea came from the fact that some Bibles have all of Jesus’ words written in red. The guy looked rather Arab, so I started thinking maybe I ought to stop talking so much. I didn’t know if I was going to put him off.
“I’m a Christian,” I added, thinking the conversation would probably end shortly after that.
“Interesting. I’m a Muslim. How many times do you pray a day?”
“I only plan one time to pray in the morning for about an hour. But I pray many times throughout the day. I don’t know how much.”
“I pray five times a day.”
I found out shortly that he was from Egypt. This was kind of a relief just in case anything I said was mistaken as evangelizing. Thankfully the law only applies to the Malay Muslim. Suddenly he was asking tons of questions about my views on talking to God, how I hear God, and what God says. His eagerness to hear more about how I experience God brought me to sharing way more than I thought I would have. He asked me to share specific things about what God has been teaching me and even read out loud some of my prayers and some of the things God has been saying. Not gonna lie, it was pretty cool being able to share those things.
When you ask God for an opportunity to serve him and talk about him, he’ll give it to you.
Just be ready for the moment to come.
