I had no idea there was going to be a third part to this story. I had already experienced the most terrible pain imaginable followed by the most perfect love from God. He led me back into a place of thriving through an intimate closeness and dependence. But apparently Sundays are for crying and learning.
Pain brought yet another lesson from the Lord that I needed to learn. I have been reading a book titled The Insanity of God written by a long time missionary whose work has been centered on persecuted Christ followers around the world. It has taught me so much about what’s ahead in the ministry God has called my life to be focused on. This book brought me to tears several times before I even finished half of it. Most of those tears were caused by things I’ve already known about the brokenness and evil that exists in our world.
Then, there was a passage that wrecked my heart with profound love and hope after the author had lost one of his sons:
“Probably the biggest surprise of the week came on Thursday when Omar Aziz, our senior Somali staff member still living in Mogadishu, appeared at the front door. I was stunned to hear him say: ‘I have walked here from Somalia. I had to come help bury our son, Timothy.’
As soon as he received word of Tim’s death, this dear Muslim friend had started a five-day odyssey. He walked through minefields, deserts, and mountains. He crossed rivers and national boarders. He had hitched rides and he had ridden on cattle trucks. And then he arrived at our home hundreds of miles later with only the clothes on his back.”
One of the most humbling examples of intentional and sacrificial love I have ever heard. I quickly realized that I have spent most of my life never coming close to loving people like that. This realization brought even more tears. Names, faces, and situations flashed across my memory’s movie screen as I wept at my failures. Classmates, friends, family, coworkers, opponents, and enemies who I had totally failed to love with the love of Christ. I had missed the greatest command that Jesus gave us.
To everyone I have ever hurt, wronged, judged, lied to, misled, made fun of, and not made more important than myself, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I am currently sitting on a rooftop in Haiti weeping over what I have done to people in my past. And as I called my self a believer in Christ, I pray that you don’t hold my failures as a reflection of a Jesus or a representation of His followers. I’m sorry. I didn’t understand then what I know now.
What’s even sadder is that I still can make the same mistakes. Sometimes I still give more love to those whom I can give it easily, and less or none at times to people whom love is difficult to give. To give the shirt off my back to a man who didn’t have one in the morning, and then pass up on doing a favor for a teammate because it didn’t convenience me in the afternoon is not a total reflection of Jesus. To be kind to people who make it easy and cold to people who make it hard is not a total reflection of Jesus.
I am thankful God is teaching me this lesson, and I know He will help me grow in loving unconditionally and self-sacrificially. Again, I apologize to the people in my past who were at the receiving end of my failure to do so at the time. I am praying for each of you and I love each of you.
In our failures, God is still good.
The same man who walked all those miles the book, Omar Aziz, asked the mourning father an important question:
“But everyone there seemed to know that Tim was in paradise! Why can’t we Muslims know that our loved ones are in paradise when they die? Why is it that only these followers of Jesus know exactly where they are going after death? We bury our people. We weep. We walk away. And we do not know where our loved ones are. Why? Why have Jesus’ followers kept such things from Somalis for over two thousand years?”
Well, church, why have we?
As I’ve written before, my life will be spent following Christ in the efforts of erasing this question. Spreading the gospel to where it’s never been, where it’s hard to spread, where it is met with hostility instead of reception. And to raise up the body of Christ to do the same. Because it breaks my heart to know and see people living without the love of Jesus.
As the author describes the horrible authorities taking place in Somalia in the 1990’s he simply, yet perfectly addressed what I’ve learned, and what I’ve been wanting to teach to my readers, friends, and acquaintances around the world who don’t know the salvation of Christ and follow Him:
“If Jesus is not the answer for the human condition, there is no answer.”
I’m still not perfect, I’m far from it. It seems the only good in me is that which is from Christ. But He has been transforming me. From wickedness to righteousness. From pain to joy. From hate to love. And if He can transform me, He can transform you. And if he can transform you, He can transform all of us. And when He transforms all of us, we will reside in the kingdom of heaven, knowing that He is the answer, knowing how much He loves us, and the way He always wanted it to be.
