The Cameron Highlands in Malaysia were surprisingly touristy. When my team planned to go there for 10 days, we thought it was just a small town next to a mossy forest and had a random golf course. Nah, guys – it was the most touristy place I’ve been to all year!
Our hostel was run by the sweetest Indian family and was located caddy corner from a decently sized park & soccer field. We used the soccer stadium seats to worship outside and pray over each other and we hung out in the park for team time – which consisted of a fair amount of Dirty UNO games and hilarious conversation.
Alright, so we were in the park playing a random game & realized towards the end that there was a man staring at us with a weirdly huge grin on his face… I can’t lie, most of us were a little creeped out by him; nevertheless, we smiled back, waved, and he came over to talk with us. While we were conversing, the guy saw a friend of his, Reese*, walk past and called him over. Reese is actually from Indonesia and of Muslim faith. Immediately, we immediately connected and made plans to hang out in the park the next day after he got off work.
The next day, Reese asked us if he could show us a game. Obviously we said yes (we love games) and sat down on a bench with our hands palm-up in front of us while he stood. Reese walked down the line, looked at our hands, and told us that he was going to tell us about our character.
Lucky me – I was first…
“I see that you’re very alone. You spend a lot of time alone, by yourself. When you have a problem, you can’t take care of it yourself. You have to talk about your problem with other people, and you are sad. You had a good childhood…and you can’t cook.”
Cool beans, Reese… cool cool cool cooooooooool.
He goes down the line and does the same to the rest of my team. Don’t worry y’all, we didn’t receive anything he was saying. We just nodded, like, “alright..that was fun…..” and then one of my teammates says, “Okay, can we listen to the Lord and tell you what He tells us?”
And we did.
We didn’t let him speak about himself before we did this. He didn’t know anything about us when he did his thing, so we didn’t want to know anything specific about him when we did ours. We explained to him that we sit for a moment and allow God to speak. Reese even allowed us to lay hands on him while we prayed.
The Lord gave us words of strength, honor, valor, kindness, and God’s Love over him. As we spoke, it was clear that we were speaking truth over lies that Reese had been living in for a long time. Oh man, it was so clear.
We told Reese that we would write these words down in Indonesian and bring them to him when we saw him next…. which was the next day 🙂
We had planned to invite Reese to go to the markets with us, but it was rainy so we ended up back at the park playing UNO under the gazebo instead. After a few games, Reese says “Tell me stories.. about anything: love stories, funny stories.. about you.”
We all kind of looked at each other and I think we all had the same thought: Is homeboy opening the door for us to straight up tell our testimonies about Jesus?…and are we really going to do this?
And we did.
We told stories of finding our strength in the Lord when life really sucked, stories of peace in God when our circumstances were chaotic, stories of finding our purpose in Him alone, of taking our problems to Him because all He wants is to take care of us… each and every one of our stories talked about Jesus, and Reese listened intently to all of them. This led to bold conversation, questions for both of our religions, challenging each other’s theology, trying to figure out God…
I wish I could say that Reese received Jesus right on the spot. But I do know that the Lord was pursuing him so hard before we got there, and He’s going to continue even though we left. Please add Reese to your prayers – he is living alone in Malaysia while his family is in the area of Indonesia that just suffered a massive earthquake. Prayers for peace, provision, and continued obvious pouring out of His love and pursuit of Reese!
